


The Wright Idea

by hermdoggydawg



Category: Unsounded
Genre: Army Level of Swearing, Fear of Flying, Gen, Magical Machines, Physics and Engineering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 18:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13957548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermdoggydawg/pseuds/hermdoggydawg
Summary: My absolute monster of an entry to the 2018 Unsounded Fanworks contest. 23K payload.Featuring a boatload of cameos, but not of the main cast.Great thanks to the bomb Ashley Cope, for making Unsounded and also putting up with us.Special thanks to @kidchars on Tumblr for edit/review. You rock.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> To Those Who Read This in the Original Google Doc from the Contest Page:
> 
> I applaud your dedication and apologize to your eyeballs.

 

Lily Orel sat in the hospital bed and read the letter again. “...granted temporary medical leave, in recognition of wounds taken in service of Her Majesty during the battle of Farnow Vale” was the pertinent line. She sat back against her pillow and closed her eyes in thought. _Farnow Vale. It was a bad time and place for our constructs. Lost so many comrades. So many sisters in arms, gone to the khert because of those damned Aldish goat-snakes._ She shook the memories and kept reading the letter. _A year, until I have to get back into an MPC. Until I_ can _get back into an MPC._ She sighed.

“Time enough,” she murmured to herself. “Time enough to try something new…”


	2. Stacking the Odds

 

Lily paced the aisles of the vast State library, stewing in frustration. Her new commanding officer, Captain Vyte, had practically laughed her out of the army hospital. _Captain Zeke wouldn’t have been so dismissive, but he didn’t make it out of Farnow Vale_. Grief mixed with her irritation, and she didn’t notice the other person in the aisle until she bowled them over.

“Ah, I’m so sorry!” She scrambled to help them up, and to pick up the notebooks scattered by the collision. As she did, Lily got a good look at the poor soul that crossed her warpath.

It was a young girl, short, slim, a head of brown curls that fell past her ears and bright green eyes that hadn’t seen enough of the world yet. A wright in training, Lily guessed from the dress. The young wright stuck out her hand in greeting. _Bold, or just courteous?_

“Lily Orel, 3rd Construct Battalion,” she offered, as she shook the wright’s hand. “And you are...”

“V-Vera Elik, 3rd year student,” the girl answered, still obviously shaken. _Just polite then._

“Third? Ah, you look a little young for that.”

The wright flushed at that, though it was a bit hard to tell through the dark brown skin. It didn’t last long in any case.

“What’s a construct pilot doing in the library?” Vera asked, a little sharply. “Last I checked, we’re still at war.”

Lily sighed and lifted up her shirt’s left side, baring one still-fresh battle scar amongst several long-faded ones. “Got this and a year of medical leave, courtesy of the great nation of Alderode,” she said, the last phrase dripping with venom. _Wish I could say the same for the rest of my comrades._ “So I figured I’d do a little research.”

“What for?”

Lily started to answer, before a librarian came by and shushed them. They both mouthed a silent apology before turning back to each other.

“Outside?” Lily offered in a low whisper. Vera just nodded.

Under the warm afternoon sun, Lily laid out her plan to achieve not just flight (any wright worth their training could redirect Momentum upwards), but aerial superiority against Aldish vliegeng. When she was done, Vera sat in thought for a moment.

“You’re far from the only one to try,” she finally ventured. “There’s likely been a dozen royal commissions toward some sort of pymaric flying machine, and easily twice as many rejected proposals.”

“And?”

“You’ve been a construct pilot for how long?”

“Four years.”

“Ever see a flying device in battle?”

“...Damn.”

Lily was silent for a moment, contemplating this new information.

“I was planning to search for works on anything related to flight,” she said. “But perhaps I can narrow down that search. Those commissions and proposals have got to be somewhere, right?”

 

~

 

That ‘somewhere’ turned out to be file cabinets in the back of a rarely-visited office in Research and Development. The rejected proposals got half a page of writing, including annotations from the judges. The commissions were longer, depending on how far the project got, and included a listing of expenses, in the Crescian way.

Lily and Vera picked out the table with the least dust and poured over their findings.

“Sweet Tirna, did this guy actually propose strapping tanks of Pressure to his shoes?”

“Would explain the note ‘transfer to desk job’ at the end.”

“And this commission? The State could build three Firelopers for the First Materials it would have used.”

“Judging from the red stamp, I think they did,” Vera wryly noted. “And look at this one. A 50 scroll spell load?!”

“What happened to that attempt?”

“Khert took out their whole workshop.”

Lily slapped her head onto the desk, sending a puff of dust into her short-cropped black hair.

“Well, I’m starting to think this is a dead end,” she moaned. _Time to go back to piloting Rockwalks and Firelopers and praying to Yerta the vliegeng are slow._

“Hey, don’t look so glum,” Vera said. She picked up another commission report. This one was a bit thicker than the rest. “Hmm, Rahm and Dani Ripa…”

“What about them?” Lily asked, head still stuck to the desk. She brushed some dust out of her hair.

“Father-son team, managed to get a _royal_ commission. Spent six months making a working prototype, and made a demonstration for the queen’s sister.”

“Since I haven’t ever heard of the Ripas until now, I’m guessing that didn’t go as planned.” Vera winced as she kept reading.

“ _Something_ went wrong in the spellwork. Khert core leeched the son and almost got the dad, except he managed to leap high enough to escape it,” she answered. She grimaced as she kept reading. “Well, not entirely. Says here he lost all Visual aspects in his legs.”

“Hmph, wonder how his wife stands not seeing those?” Lily joked half-heartily.

Vera looked through the next few pages.

“These are just supplements,” she noted. “First Materials used, size and power of the spellburner, and a couple of eyewitness reports, including Lady Rilursa herself.” She kept reading silently. “Not a loquacious one, that royal.” She slid a sheet over to Lily, who lifted her head up from the table to give it a look.

“Well, not as bad as some of the proposals,” she thought out loud. “Spell load still quite heavy, and I’d wager that complexity made a mistake more likely, and more dangerous.”

Lily leaned back in thought. _Complex spellwork is not good in combat._

“All these attempts are variations on the same idea,” she finally said. “Redirect downward Momentum upward.”

“Any wright can do that,” Vera interrupted.

“Aye, but it requires serious focus to fly around, and not everyone is a wright.”

“Are you?”

Lily started a bit at that question.

“...Yes,” she answered. “Pymary is recommended for construct pilots.” She sighed again, and wandered out into the front lobby. The sun was not quite setting yet, and rays of light shone through the small windows.

“I think we need to take a different approach,” she declared. She caught Vera cocking an eyebrow at her use of “we,” but she didn’t explain. “Go simple, keep the spell load as slim as possible. Ideally, do it without pymary entirely.” _The vliegeng use the khert lines to fly. If my device doesn’t need the khert at all, I can outclimb them and gain the high ground, er...sky._

“Well,” Vera started. “If you want to do it without pymary, why not ask someone who can do exactly that?”

“Who?! What person can fly without commanding the khert?”

Despite Lily’s incredulity, Vera simply pointed out the window. Lily followed her finger, and saw several sparrows fluttering around a hay wagon just outside the office.

“Oh.”


	3. Tunnel Vision

 

“<Heed me, Great Khert…>”

Lily frantically uttered the commands to redirect her downward Momentum upward, even as she flapped the cloth-and-feather wings strapped to her back. It was the first device she and Vera had felt confident enough to try out, which they did from a tall cliff on the outskirts of town. _Clearly our confidence has been misplaced_.

The still-in-school wright came barreling over as the khert carried out the spell, letting Lily gently float to the ground. She tore off the straps and not-so-gently threw the wings aside.

“You glided a little bit at the end,” Vera offered anxiously, carefully stepping around the poor imitation of a bird’s wings scaled up to human size.

“Not enough,” Lily grumbled in response. “Agh, we’ve stared at birds for how long now? Dissected how many of them to see how their wings are made?”

“Enough for that anatomy teacher to stop letting us use his classroom. He’s still finding feathers in his drawers.”

“Still don’t get that. You did a good job core leeching the blood stains afterwards.”

“Feathers and blood are two different things.”

Lily glared at Vera. The wright simply shrugged. By now the two of them were accustomed to each other’s personality quirks. She bent down and picked up the wings.

“Ach, how do birds do it?” Lily vented again. “They just flap their wings, and up they go. And yet when I tried to do it…”

“Eh, you fell slower than you would have without them,” Vera offered again. She examined the feathers and let Lily continue. Luckily, she began to calm down before her tirade drew too much attention.

“Is it the damned weight?” Lily fumed. “Bird bones are much less dense than ours, filled with hollows and nooks yet still structurally sound enough to support the body.” She snatched the wings out of Vera’s hands. “But we scaled up the size and spent two whole nights carefully hollowing out the wooden struts in this, Vera, and this still didn’t work!”

She wound back her arm and hurled the wings forward with all her not-insignificant strength. Her arms had recovered weeks ago, and years of lifting construct parts and climbing up ladders had given them some bulk.

Vera stared in wonder as the wings remained level from the throw. Two yards out, a light breeze came up behind it, and the wings began to soar upward. Lily noticed it too, and halted her frustrated screaming to gawk as well.

The breeze died away, and the wings dropped and crashed front-first into the dirt. It had flown five yards out and half a yard upward.

Already the two girls were rushing to pick up the wings and try again.

“Let’s get back up to the cliff! I bet there’s stronger wind up there!” Lily exclaimed.

“Forget that! Just condense some Momentum and assign it to the wings!” Vera countered.

And so they did. Unfortunately, the overeager wrights put too much Momentum into their prototype, accelerating it above thirty yards a second. The cloth tore itself apart and the feathers fell away in clumps, though for some reason, the struts stay intact.

“Well shit,” Lily said flatly.

“At least now we know why birds can’t fly that fast,” Vera added. “We need a better way to study this method,” she mused. “How does forward Momentum translate into an upwards lifting force?” she began to wonder.

On a lark, Vera decided to cast a simple spell.

"<Heed me, Great Khert>” she began. Slowly, she condensed Momentum from falling leaves again. Finally, she assigned it all at once to a cube of air right behind her and Lily.

The resulting wind blew off her hat and billowed out their coats, making Lily curse again.

“Why? Why the fuck did you do that?” she asked.

“To see if I could,” Vera answered plainly.

 

~

 

A week later, the two of them had built a large tunnel-like room in an empty warehouse. Lily had flashed her army badge, and “temporarily requisitioned it for State use” from the owners, who protested mildly despite not having anything to store in that particular warehouse.

“So, you think that the _air_ is lifting the wings,” Lily asked once again. Vera had explained her theory a few times before, since that day by the cliff. Lily understood it the second time, but for some reason she just liked hearing Vera explain it again and again. _And her little exasperated sigh, right before she takes a deep breath and launches her lecture. And it’s a brilliant idea. Instead of propelling the wings through the air, move the air around the wings._

“Yes,” Vera replied, this time not willing to rise to the bait. Her hypothesis on the origin of lift had distracted her several times in her classes, and she was lucky it had yet to happen during a spell cast. Still, if she could just pin it down, maybe submit an article to a scholarly journal…

“And this tunnel?”

“Remember that wind I made a week ago?”

“...yes?”

“This is for that.”

“For wind,” Lily said, with feigned disbelief. She hoped to draw out another lecture.

Vera sighed.

“This tunnel is meant to produce wind. Not just that, but I want to assign some Color to it, to see how it behaves around a wing. I believe that the air is pushing upwards on the bottom of the wing as it moves by it. Under proper conditions, it’s enough to overcome gravity,” she explained once again. “You have another wing to test?”

Lily grinned, both at the question and at her success in getting Vera to expound on her theory. She walked over to a nearby table and lifted the tarp off, revealing another pair of wings, this time featherless.

“It’s canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Good metal is still a little hard to acquire on a construct pilot’s stipend of points,” she answered.

After suspending the wings in the middle of the tunnel, Lily cast the spell to produce a moderately strong gust of wind while Vera kept reassigning bright yellow Color from several buckets of paint to the swiftly moving air in the tunnel. As the wind picked up, Lily watched with eager eyes as the wings began to slowly rise up, while Vera scribbled in a notebook and muttered something about differential airflow. Their dreams were starting to take flight.

 

~

 

Several weeks and two scholarly publications from Vera later, the aspiring aviatrixes had another device ready to test outside. Their wind tunnel had provided a wealth of data, which went toward Vera’s papers (which secured if not the permission, at least forgiveness from her professors for skipping class a few times) and Lily’s efforts to refine the wing structure.

The result of the latter was a long and thick rectangular wing made out of oak wood and canvas, attached to an almost-skeletal carriage with four small wheels and a single seat for the pilot. The current prototype had two separate wings, one to each side, attached near the center of the carriage. The pilot, by pulling on a set of ropes, could twist and tilt each wing for rudimentary steering (As far as Vera and Lily could tell, this is what birds did). At the back of the carriage was a much smaller pair of wooden triangular wings, resembling a sparrow’s tail. Tests on small model aircraft in the wind tunnel revealed a need for something to stabilize the craft in case of sudden strong gusts, and Lily figured they could just once again copy a bird.

The plan for getting airborne was simple: Vera would keep applying Momentum (harvested from rocks dropped off a cliff, and stored in a First Glass bottle) to propel the craft forward. They picked a long two-mile stretch of flat open plain to test their device. There were a few farmers and shepherds in the area who noticed the odd vehicle and were glancing over between their work. Lily paid them no attention. _I reckon we’re far ahead of any possible competition, and Alderode has no reason to build aircraft when they can breed them instead._

Lily climbed into the cockpit, put on her goggles and leather helmet, and tugged on the ropes to test the wings.

“All clear!” she shouted, keeping her eyes straight forward. She only heard Vera’s incantation, transferring the stored Momentum from the bottle to her hand. Then, the one transferring it from her hand to the carriage.

The craft shot forward with a jerk, slamming Lily’s head back into the seat. When she managed to open her eyes, she could both see and feel the craft lift off the ground. It wasn’t much, she could count the _evara_ on one hand, but for their efforts so far, it was superb.

“More speed!” she screamed back. If she got a little higher, she could try turning. She heard bits of Vera’s spell, and the craft sped up. And went up. _A little higher…_

Lily pulled the left wing up, and the craft banked left, to her surprise. _That’s...not very intuitive._ She pulled the right wing up, and the craft leveled out again. Lily glanced around, and realized her craft had only turned a few degrees. _Hmm, need something better to steer with. Vera keeps talking about airflow, and how it works like water, in a sense. How about something like a ship’s rudder to steer?_

She failed to notice the craft losing speed and thus height. A hard jolt jerked Lily out of her stream of thoughts. The two front wheels had struck a rock that was jutting out from the normally flat ground. It broke the front wheels, and the entire craft bent forward to an almost-vertical angle before falling back on the rear wheels with a worrisome crunch. _And there go the back wheels._

After regaining her senses, Lily half-rolled out of the carriage, her normally sturdy legs suddenly feeling like jelly. She flopped onto the ground, feeling both relieved and disappointed that she was no longer in the air. Vera was running toward her, and several bystanders were standing there with their mouths open.

When Vera finally reached her, Lily simply stared at her and ignored the outstretched hand meant to help her up.

“How long was I up?” she asked, absentmindedly.

“Six minutes. You break anything?”

“The wheels.”

“Not the prototype, you fool.”

Lily shook her head. Her legs felt fine now, and she didn’t feel anything worse than a bruise on her ass. She finally stood up and brushed off some dirt.

“Well, I think we have enough to secure a State commission, don’t you?”

 

 


	4. A Riv-eting Performance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I could have stopped here.
> 
> I didn't, but I could have.

 

Vera stared at the large, dull-looking brick building in front of her, then at the key in Lily’s hand.

“Why are we here?” she asked, again. This time, the construct pilot answered.

“Several reasons. One, this is the ‘Clubhouse’ where me and my army friends unwound between campaigns. Two, a royal commission needs a space to match, right? Three, we also need materials, and officially this is a storage facility for old constructs that the State never got around to scrapping or repairing.” She stuck the key into the door and turned. The lock opened with a distressing groan, and the pair stepped inside.

The room was dimly lit, so Vera condensed some of the outside sunlight into her hand. With that, she could see that she was standing in a large parlor, with dusty furniture scattered about. A table and set of chairs there, a bunk bed here, two long couches there, a recliner by the shuttered window.

“So this is where the brave soldiers of Cresce spend their free time.”

“Eh, some of it. Depends on how long the peace lasts,” Lily answered, a little bitterly.

“Any friends who might drop by?” Vera asked, and instantly regretted it when she saw the shadow that passed over her friend’s face.

“No,” Lily answered, after a long deep sigh. “This place was sort of invite-only, I mean, we tended to be generous with invites, being soldiers and all. But, Twins-damn-it, the last war was bad.” She rubbed her temples. “There was one other guy, but I got a letter from his father a month ago. Killed in action, fighting against pirates off Lurick.”

Vera stood there in silence, unsure of what to say or do.

“I’m sorry,” she finally offered. “At-at least we have the place to ourselves.”

“Us and the ghosts.”

“What?!”

That brought Lily out of her grim mood.

“I told you, storage for old constructs. A good number of ‘em have ghosts in their pymarics,” she answered, a smile coming back onto her face. “Normally we let the new friends find that out on their own, but I figured I’d spare you that, at least.”

“So this place holds a bunch of military constructs haunted by ghosts,” Vera said, suddenly sounding wary about trying to build their new aircraft here.

“We emptied out the cannons’ Aspect tanks, cut wires and decoupled conductors in the controls,” Lily added, trying to reassure her. It worked, a little. “There’s not that many MPCs in here. No big Firelopers, they can’t fit. Last I checked, there were two Rockwalks and two Battlebrigs in here.”

A quick look into the actual storage space, and she amended her inventory.

“The ‘brigs are gone, but there’s a new Rockwalk. Well, new to this space, it’s an old Model 5, I think,” she rattled off. “Compared to the 4, it’s got tanks of Pressure  _ and _ Temperature, separate firing controls for both, and automated Weight displacement for fording rivers.” She patted the old machine while Vera examined the Aspect tanks.  _ Good call, we’ll definitely need those soon. _

Suddenly, a phantom saddlehound pup burst out of the control panel, followed by what appeared to be the memory of a sandwich. Vera fell back from the construct and scooted away, while Lily just grinned and waved away the ghosts with a wooden plank.

“Hmph, clearing out ghosts. Just another chore to do before we build Cresce’s first aerial construct, eh?”

 

~

 

Their new workspace, previously the main storage area, was better in many respects. More space, more tools (in fact, the spellburner was the only large piece of equipment they needed to actually order), and closer to both the capital and wide open fields for testing prototypes. They had moved their wind tunnel here as well. Sure, there was one official who was worried about Aldish spies, but his concerns were cast aside by Lily, most of the other commission judges, and even Lady Rilursa Sonorie. Her Majesty’s sister coolly pointed out that if the Alds really wanted to, they could spy on the tests anywhere. At least close to Fluirstadt, they would be more likely to be caught.

A knock on the front door interrupted another vigorous debate on control mechanisms. The aviatrixes stepped away from the two blackboards filled with complicated equations and mechanical sketches and went to answer the door.

Lily cracked it open a few inches. It was a State delivery man, with a somewhat large covered wagon behind him.

“What business?” she asked.

“Your order, Miss Orel,” he answered matter-of-factly, as if it was his fifth delivery today.

“Is that the spellburner?” Vera asked quietly. The delivery man heard anyway.

“Yes,” he answered. He held out a clipboard and quill. “Sign here, and here, and here. And on the next page.”

Lily sighed and signed away.  _ Crescian bureaucracy _ . She handed the quill back and watched the delivery man order two larger burlier men to unload a crate from the wagon and bring it inside.

As Vera unpacked the spellburner, Lily mentally reviewed their current progress. By now, most of the theory on airflow physics was quite solid. Vera had spent the last months of her pymary training polishing up a final treatise on the subject, while Lily had been overseeing the move to the Clubhouse and passing word of her new endeavor along to Captain Vyte and her old unit. Similarly, the central carriage (a naval officer had helpfully suggested the term ‘hull’) and landing wheels had been revamped using mostly metal support structures, wooden coverings, and spring-cushions for the undercarriage.

Until the arrival of the spellburner, the pair had been stuck on propulsion. Lily had thought it simple enough to modify an Aspect cannon to apply stored Momentum to the carriage. She wasn’t completely wrong; the aiming functions could be discarded, but now the device had to supply a direction. The biggest obstacle though was trying to continuously apply Momentum, when the cannon had been designed and programmed to fire manually loaded single shots. Hence the necessity of the saddlehound-sized spellburner now sitting on their shop floor. They could still salvage the First Materials, especially the Aspect tank, from the old constructs, but the spellwork had to be written and burned almost from scratch.

Right before the delivery man interrupted, the pair were working on controlling the craft’s flight. Or at least, sketching out a mechanism for control. Having decided to swap out the wooden struts and spars for stronger metallic ones, twisting the wing clearly wasn’t going to work anymore (and did not steer fast enough anyway). Vera argued that small flat panels on the wing’s edges that could be raised or lowered would provide control. Lily was concerned on how a pilot was supposed to, well, pilot the craft with those panels. They had at least settled definitely on the rudder design, a near-perfect copy of a ship’s rudder mounted upside-down on a vertical tail at the rear of the carriage, above the horizontal tail in the original prototype. How the pilot would control the rudder was still being debated between an exact copy of a ship’s wheel, and the usual MPC stick.  _ Sweet Tirna, we sure are lazy sometimes. First stealing from birds now ships. _

“Alright Vera, load up the scrolls to burn, and let’s get back to  _ control _ .”

The now-certified wright didn’t even look up from the spellburner as she entered in the lines of Old Tainish. Thankfully, they had written the code earlier (Vera judged it safe enough to apply Momentum every second without overloading the khert, and Lily decided that would be enough to keep the craft airborne). There remained the matter of testing it, of course.

“Right,  _ control _ . I know you’re used to moving machines on the ground, but this craft can turn in  _ three _ dimensions, not two,” she began, not stopping her work on the burner. “That’s three sets of controls we need to build.”

Lily scoffed and went back to the pilot’s chair on the carriage of their current craft.

“A stick will cover two out of three,” she fired back, as she climbed in and contemplated a practical control panel. Out of a habit of restlessness, she began to tap her feet.  _ Hang on, there’s a lot of empty space here… _

“What about foot pedals for the third?” she asked.

“You tryin’ to get a kick out of me, Lily?”

 

~

 

It was late morning, and their royal observer was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon, to view what many hoped would be Cresce’s first mechanized foray into the skies. Neither aviatrix had the heart to tell them that this would be the construct’s second flight.

Several nights ago, with a moonless night and no one around, Lily took to the skies once again in their prototype, which she had dubbed the Nightingale after the nearly twenty minute flight. That night, for the first time, the aircraft ran on its own power, and Lily was able to pilot it without speaking a word of Old Tainish.

The Nightingale was a distant cousin to the now-primitive flying craft they had first tested months ago (though that craft had been repaired and flown briefly once more to secure their commission). The wings and hull were now braced by metal salvaged from the Rockwalks’ legs, though the coverings were still stretched canvas and leather. Sitting just a bit off the center of the hull was the First Glass tank and Momentum conductor (calling it a “cannon” didn’t feel right anymore), positioned just so that with the weight of a pilot (Lily considered herself a little heavier than average, so they went with her weight for the calculations) it would shift the center of gravity close to the center of the craft. The front of the hull was a smooth metal cone that connected cleanly with the glass windshield protecting the pilot’s face, with a rounded point at the very front end. It looked like a bird beak, if one was near-sighted and squinted hard enough. So they called it a nose instead. For control, there were three main mechanisms: a four-directional stick between the pilot’s knees, a throttle connected to the Momentum conductor, and a set of foot pedals. The rudder and Vera’s control panels were made with steel. The pilot’s seat had also been salvaged from a construct, and Lily briefly contemplated welding a face plate to the front of the hull. It was too heavy though, so she dropped it. 

After the first flight, Lily had insisted on one final change: a second seat in the rear.

“You’re batshit crazy. You’ve lost your mind from breathing in too much metal dust. Some ghost we missed got in your brain,” Vera had protested, when Lily told her.

“I’m perfectly sane, Vera. I’ve been up twice now, three times if you count that crappy wing suit thing. So I’m not doing this alone again,” she had fired back. “And I want to see how  _ you _ like it up there. So yes, I really want you behind me. I’m not leaving you grounded.”  _ And I want a good wright up there when I’m dropping vliegeng _ , Lily reminded herself.

By an odd stroke of fate, the date of their first demonstration came one day after Cresce signed a truce with Alderode, fixing the border between the nations (for a time anyway).

“Ya know, there used to be a betting pool amongst old veterans,” Lily remarked off-hand, as she and Vera continued to prepare their aircraft for the demo. “To see how long the truce would last.”

“Wait, how? Our Labor Points are tied to us and can’t be spent by another person.”

“Oh, the losers just went out and bought things the winner wanted, usually right after the peace is broken and before we get packed off. I heard right before the Foi-Hollick fiasco, one lucky pikeman made off with a literal boatload of seafood. And one unlucky battlewright had to blow three months’ earnings on a table shark,” Lily explained, as she oiled a hinge.

Soon the sun reached its zenith, the crowd had grown a bit, but the observer’s tent was still completely empty.  _ Not even an aide to make sure the chair’s cushion was properly fluffed _ .

“Hey, tank’s full, right?” Lily asked, checking the seat harnesses one final time. She stared off into the distance, focusing on Sonorie Palace.  _ Can’t be that far... _

Vera tapped the Glass tank, then checked the Aspect gauge wired to the Momentum conductor. She gave a thumbs up, before she saw the look on Lily’s face and slowly lowered it.

“Whatever you’re planning, just, no,” she said.

“I’m just wondering what’s taking them so long.”

“Uh huh. Wondering.”

“We could, you know, just go and check…”

“They’re probably just still finalizing the truce. Triple-checking the clauses.” But Lily could tell her reluctance was weakening.

“Must be awful boring. Would be almost doing them a favor if we...checked in on them.” That grin widened. Vera sighed, shut her eyes, and whispered a quiet incantation. Lily only caught a few words, but it was enough to guess.

“Weather’s good,” the wright said, opening her eyes. She glanced at the pennants that lined their take-off strip of land. “Weak breeze, a few degrees off from perpendicular to the road to the capital.”

“Hot Tirna!” Lily exclaimed, throwing a leather helmet at her partner, followed by a pair of goggles.

Vera caught the helmet but not the goggles.

“Just a quick flight!” she asserted, just a bit too weakly, as she picked her goggles off the ground. Lily shucked off her working gloves, pulled on her flying gloves (better leather, wool-lined for that cold sky-high air, but fingerless for that sense of touch at the controls), and put on her own headgear. The now-twice aerial pilot climbed into the Nightingale’s front seat, and carefully watched Vera climb a bit awkwardly into the rear seat. Both of them buckled their harnesses.

Lily looked back at the tail and worked the rudder pedals with her feet. She pressed her right foot down, and the rudder swung right. Then she pressed her left foot, and the rudder swung left.  _ Can’t steer the craft without this. _

“Rudder, check!” she shouted.

She shifted her gaze just a bit downward to the pair of hinged rectangular panels on the rear of the tail. As she pushed the control stick forward, the panels swung down (and the aircraft would tilt up in flight). Lily pulled the stick back, and the panels swung up (and the aircraft would tilt down in flight).  _ It should go without saying that keeping the panels up for a long time is a bad idea. _

“Elevators, check!”

Lily moved the stick back to center, then shifted it left and right repeatedly.  _ This one is a little complicated. _ On the rear tips of each wing was another hinged fin-like panel. These particular two were linked to swing in opposing directions, so Lily had to glance left and right several times to check them. Pushing the stick toward a wing would swing that wing’s panel up (and the opposite wing’s panel down). In flight, the aircraft would roll or bank toward the wing with the raised panel.  _ How did Vera figure this out? Well, at least I figured out how to make it easy for the pilot. Stick left, roll left. Stick right, roll right. Nice and simple. _

“Air fins, check!”

She glanced back one more time, at Vera. The young wright had a clear look of terror on her face, but there was a boldness in her eyes as she double-checked her harness and gave a weak thumbs up.

“Let’s get this party started!” Lily screamed as she flicked on the Momentum conductor and pushed the throttle up. Despite her (half-hearted) effort to be gentle, the Nightingale jerked forward and rolled down the strip. The crowd stilled and stepped back just a bit, as Lily continued to throttle the pymaric propulsion system.  _ Eh, fuck it. _ She shoved the throttle forward.

The construct shot forward, the end of the landing strip growing closer at an alarming rate.

“Raise the nose!” Vera shouted.  _ Oh right _ . Lily pulled back the stick, just in time to clear the fence at the end of the field. She could hear the sighs of relief from the crowd gathered there. Before Vera could admonish her in a loud yet squeaky voice, Lily relaxed the pull and began to push just a little, leveling out the aircraft. She pulled back the throttle just a hair too. She glanced back quickly to make sure Vera was attentive. She was.

“We’ll keep the road underneath us, in case they’re on it,” she shouted back. The wind was howling rather loudly now that they had some altitude. Lily guessed 150  _ evara _ , maybe a bit more. She couldn’t compare against anything nearby, because they had already climbed higher than those things. They were still climbing, though slowly since she hadn’t adjusted the elevators. Lily glanced at the stored Momentum gauge.  _ Hmm, we’re good. _

As she worked the rudder and air fins to stay on course, she looked down at the ground. More and more people were looking up now, shouting or waving or running either toward or away the aircraft.  _ They look so small from up here. Reminds me of my first time in a Fireloper _ . Lily caught herself. Normally memories of her time as a construct pilot brought back sadness and grief. Now the wind and the sky took that away and made her weightless. She went back.  _ But no Fireloper could move this fast. Ok, so this old gal can’t shoot fire or anything. Yet. _

“No sign of a royal party,” Vera reported, her voice starting to calm down. It was shaky instead of squeaky, and not as loud as before.  _ Her heart probably dropped back down her throat. Not quite into her ribcage, but it’s getting there. _

“Ha! To the capital!” Lily replied. “If the Sonories can’t meet us, we’ll meet them!”

“Baelar save me!” Vera screamed, as Lily throttled the conductor again and turned toward the capital.

 

~

 

If there had ever been a royal party making their way to the demonstration field, the aviatrixes never saw them below. By now, word must have reached them of the fast-moving craft approaching Fluirstadt’s skies. Lily could only pray to the Twins that no one mistook the Nightingale for a vliegeng.  _ And that the tank holds enough. _ She wasn’t entirely sure if there was a suitable landing spot in the capital. Worst case, they might be able to bail out in the harbor. Maybe.

The tall royal palace grew larger in the windshield view, and Vera’s frantic screaming turned into resigned whimpering. Then she went quiet as they approached the towering apartment complexes near the city center. Lily spared another look back, to see the wright frozen still in fascination.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to see the capital up close. From the ground!” she teased. Lily slowed the craft a bit and pushed the stick down, bringing her closer to the aforementioned ground. She banked and turned toward a hill full of stunned Cresican citizens, slowing down just enough to give them a soldier’s salute.  _ Pity I can’t remember where the foreign embassies are. Show off Cresce’s new toy, built by the daughters of the Great Mother. _ She pulled away, back toward the palace. A moment later, she pulled the craft up to clear the last row of buildings before the palace itself. She glanced down at the open courtyards below.

“Big! Machine….thing! Ten o’clock position, five hundred yards out!” Vera shouted. The vagueness of the first report, juxtaposed to the precise second report, was enough for Lily to chortle.

“Mother Guardian!” Lily answered, trying to recall if she still knew anyone in that branch of the armed forces. It was the most comfortable posting for a construct pilot, but there were rarely more than two Guardian MPCs stationed by the palace, and they were crewed by mostly Peaceguard pilots, and every so often some regular pilot who did something heroic enough to earn basically early retirement. She waved away the distracting memories and refocused on flying.

The tall and skinny Guardian was definitely paying attention to the Nightingale, Lily realized. Its head tracked the aircraft, making its long bright orange “locks” swing back and forth slowly like rope in molasses. She heard fragments of an incantation over the wind, and realized Vera was trying to spell out a message in the clouds.

“We’re the Crescian aerial inventors. Where is Her Majesty’s observing party?” it finally said. The Guardian didn’t answer. Neither did the frantically moving Peaceguard in the courtyard below, all mounted on hounds and trying somewhat unsuccessfully to herd onlookers to safety.  _ Relax boys, I won’t crash this gal. Not into solid ground anyway. _

“Damn it!” Vera cursed.

“I know! Let’s try the palace!” Lily decided, and Vera groaned and whimpered again. She flew by the Guardian and gave another salute. This time the construct answered with a salute of its own.  _ You’re alright, big guy. Your crew too. _

“Oh Twins, Lily, you’re not gonna…”

“Ahahahahaha! Let’s see what this baby can do!”

“Augh!”

Lily ignored that, and focused instead on the rush of adrenaline coursing through her blood. Her earlier moves were about to pale in comparison to what she wanted to try now.

Sonorie Palace had half a dozen or so arches sprouting from the central tower, the bottom arches actually holding the structure aloft above the harbor waters. Lily briefly considered flying right under the center, but decided it was too risky and not flashy enough. So she began weaving and looping through the arches in a dazzling display of aerial acrobatics, all of it perfectly visible to the staring citizens in the courtyard. Even the Peaceguard were starting to give up their efforts, and just sat there awestruck as well. She made a pass at the speaking balcony, the wings nearly vertical as she flew by and waved at the shocked palace official with a headband holding back his puffy hair. Vera cast her cloud-written query again, in vain.  _ Heh, we’re too fast. By the time they can recover from the shock, we’re out of earshot. _

“Must be in the upper levels!”

“Tirna take me.”

“Not even she can catch us now!” Lily throttled the conductor and began to make a spiraling climb up the central tower. Somehow, the blasphemous boast only made her bolder. She raced past window after window, balcony after balcony, trying to catch a glimpse of a Sonorie. All she spotted were palace officials with their jaws on the floor, and two-toe servants in a similar state of disbelief.

The Nightingale spiraled past the summit of the palace, and Lily’s spirits finally started to dampen a bit.  _ Did they rush the royals off to a safe room inside the palace, fearing an attack? Is the Queen and her sister just out of the city? Damn, even that bloody Ald...wait. _

“Vera! You see some dapper fuck with skin like a cherry and hair bloody crimson?”

“Come again?!”

“Roger Foi-Hollick, er, Sonorie! One of Her Majesty’s husbands!”

“Oh! Hang on, let me scrape my eyeballs off my googles, you bloody maniac! Oi, check the tank!”

Lily took a break from her trick flying and read off the gauge. She ran some quick calculations.

“Aw shit, no way we’re getting back to the field!”

“Twins-damn it! Well, I found the Ald. Far end of the courtyard, between Yerta and the palace entrance!” Vera reported back, evidently saving her chagrin at the low Momentum for later.

Lily brought the aircraft back down, doing one last loop around an arch before making a pass toward the red Aldish exile. The royal consort stuck out like a, well, bloody cherry, and sure enough, Lily spotted two regal-looking women close to him, and a knot of Peaceguard to boot.  _ Well finally, it’s the Sonories! _

“Lily! What now? We can’t make it back to the landing field,” Vera finally asked. Lily turned and simply grinned again.

“Oh bloody Riv.”

“Oh relax, Vera. Give them some warning first. I need to swing around the palace seaside again to make the approach. Courtyard’s flat and long enough, and hey, just yank out Momentum if it gets bad!”

Vera sighed, a long and deep one this time. She began to mutter the spell. Lily, true to her word, made one final circuit around the palace as the khert carried out Vera’s commands and rearranged the clouds into a polite but firm demand for space on the courtyard.

Whether or not the demand was understood, there was indeed a wide open strip of space in the courtyard when Lily rolled the Nightingale around for the final approach. The question remained, though, if they could land and halt before hitting the stairs in the middle.

Lily brought down the throttle and gently nudged the stick forward, aiming to glide down into the courtyard. She cleared the outer fence by barely two  _ evara _ , and when the wheels made contact with the ground, she shut off the conductor completely. The aircraft now simply rolled forward on the wheels with the leftover Momentum, the crowd staying a good distance back until the craft passed them before crowding forward again.

_ Hmph, still a little too fast _ .

“<Heed Me Great Khert, by the measure of  _ evara _ take five  _ evara _ -pounds per second of forward Momentum from the wood and steel hull under my palm and…>” Lily cast, taking her hand off the stick. She redirected that bit of Momentum to a small cube of air twenty  _ evara _ above her head, and so the khert slowed down the aircraft and created a small upward gust of wind that no one noticed. It was enough, and the Nightingale came to a full stop mere inches from the first step.

All three Sonories, and their Peaceguard escort, had cautiously approached the now-still aircraft. No one had weapons or palms raised, which Lily took as a good sign.  _ If Lady Rilursa opens her mouth though… _ She silently prayed that Her Majesty’s sister and presumed successor did not hear her earlier boast.

The two aviatrixes unbuckled their harnesses and climbed out of their aircraft, gingerly in Vera’s case. This was the wright’s first flight, after all. To her credit, she did not vomit. In fact, despite the clear trembling in her legs and arms, she was giving Lily a not-quite-death glare. Lily subtly jerked her head at the royals, reminding Vera that they were in the presence of the most powerful people in the land, before kneeling in deference at the bottom of the steps. Vera got the message, and stood up enough to do a full kneel as well.

“Rise,” Her Majesty commanded, after what seemed like an hour but was probably thirty seconds. Lily and Vera obeyed, and in that slightly awkward silence, they were able to take a full measure of the party that stood before them.

The royal matriarchs stood piston-rod straight, their faces almost completely unreadable, though Lily caught the barest glimpse of a smile on the Queen’s face. The red Ald, though, had eyes bulging out of their sockets and an open mouth that usually preceded drooling. The Peaceguard resembled Lady Rilursa more than the Aldish exile. Well, except for one well-built battlewright with streaks of turquoise in her black hair. She was grinning ear to ear, almost as if she was holding in a bout of laughter. Right next to her, in a rigid pose that Lily recognized time and again, must be the commanding officer.  _ Wait...Captain Emil Sava Toma? _ The renowned Peaceguard captain, the farmboy turned hero, was almost instantly recognizable. He at least did not look angry.

“Miss Orel, Miss Elik, your demonstration was scheduled for 14:00 hours,  _ outside  _ Fluirstadt,” Lady Rilursa finally broke the silence. Lily began to grope for an answer aside from “Why the fuck should we wait?” when Vera spoke up.

“My lady, Your Majesty, it was past 13:00 and your viewing pavilion was still completely empty. We thought it prudent to take the construct up and search the road, in case you ran into delays,” she answered as if responding to a professor’s question in lecture. “Such as bandits,” she added, eyes flicking to Captain Toma. Lily took one more look at the Queen’s face. Her Majesty’s smile lasted a bit longer this time.

“And given the recent truce, ink still wet on the paper, we considered the possibility of making the Aldish envoys think twice about breaking this peace,” Lily continued, managing to not put any venom into the word Aldish, though why she offered this modicum of civility to the ruddy Copper before her was a mystery. Vera’s rationale did not explain why they sped into the capital, nor why they put on such a show.

“Hmph,” went Lady Rilursa. She seemed about to answer the answer, when the Queen lightly gripped her sister’s arm.

“Time will tell if you succeeded there,” she said calmly. “My sister was busy with some Gefendur matters, and I had considered sending my lovely Roger here in her stead.” The looks that flashed across some of the Peaceguards’ faces was downright murderous.  _ Hmm, well I may have saved her some scandal there _ . _ Such favor, to an Ald. And if he did turn traitor and run back home, the knowledge of our construct… _

“Well, glad to have saved all of you the trip,” Lily replied. “It’s just under a hour by road, even with a good carriage, but we covered that distance in a quarter of the time.”

“But of course!” the Ald blurted out, earning dagger eyes that lasted longer this time. “Roads curve and wind as they often do, but you flew like a bird, straight and true!”  _ Oh Riv, a poet. _

“Such is the power of flight. Even the lines of the khert bend, forcing a vliegeng to bend with it, or grab another line,” Vera replied in an academic tone. Recently the two had been pouring over any available literature on the unnatural Aldish beasts that kept giving Crescian armies such a hard time.  _ And demands the deployment of massive constructs. _ Lily intended for their next aircraft to be more than capable of taking on those damned goat-snakes. She kept those plans to herself, for now.

At that, the military potential of mechanized flight entered the minds of the Peaceguard, and here and there smiles started to form. The blue-haired wright just kept grinning, though now she began to study the aircraft. The bloody Ald remained blissfully unaware of how fragile his homeland’s aerial dominance just became.

“In light of your...performance, would you two brave and clever innovators care to join us for dinner this evening?” Her Majesty suddenly offered. Lily was just a tad suspicious, but to refuse a royal invitation?  _ Might as well turn to Ssaelism _ . 

“We would be honored, Your Majesty,” Vera replied. “We beg for some time, though, to take care of our aircraft. Check the wheels, recharge the tank with…” Lily shot her a look that made her stop spilling what was still a State secret.

“Of course,” Lady Rilursa butted in. “We’ll find a secure hangar for it.”  _ So you can take a fine-toothed comb over it yourself. You sat in on our proposal meeting. _ Lily didn’t say that thought out loud. The lady was, after all, second in line for the throne, miles ahead of any possible rival in the choosing. A polite request could become an order easily.

“Ah, do I spy a second seat?” the Ald interrupted, earning him more glares again. “For an idle passenger, perhaps?” The Ald was eager and brimming with hope, while Lady Rilursa and the Peaceguard felt a fusion of terror and uncertainty.  _ Are they wondering if he’ll...have an accident? Harness slips, he drops a couple hundred feet and paints the ground red, and the Queen is free of Aldish whispers at night again. _

“Ah, no. It’s best for a trained wright to sit in the rear, in case of any...problems,” Vera answered, her reply riding down that hope like a charging saddlehound, to the considerable relief of everyone except the Ald. But the Peaceguard wright lit up, and opened her mouth before Captain Toma placed a strong hand on her shoulder. She closed her mouth with a pout, and Lily felt a small pang of pity.

Her Majesty began to notice the gathering crowd around them. Even the lone Guardian had leaned in a little.

“I believe a speech is expected on my part,” the Queen said. “I’ll need to find Lord Ufal, and pick his jaw off the floor.”

“Oh, Your Majesty, I’m sure you can wing it and come out high and dry,” Lily joked.

 


	5. Struts and Bolts

 

Dinner was almost nothing but tense silence. The Ald kept trying to compose more poetry to commemorate the occasion, while the aviatrixes kept as mum as they could on the inner workings of the Nightingale. Aside from the royal family and Captain Toma, there were high-ranking generals, palace officials, and notable scholars at the table. All of them alternated between imitating a mountain and giving the Ald dirty looks. Lily deduced from the somewhat hastily placed silverware that many were last-minute guests like her and Vera.

Then Her Majesty and the Ald excused themselves to see to their baby. Just before she closed the door, the Queen gave the whole table a blatant wink, out of her husband’s sight.

The room practically exploded in talk.

“Twins above, you scared me halfway into the khert!” Lord Ufal exclaimed, slamming his wine goblet on the table. Lily found out earlier that he was the headband-wearing official they saw on the speaking balcony.

“How in Baelar’s name did you do it? We’ve been chasing powered flight for decades. Ripa’s machine ten years ago was the closest we got, then today you run circles around the palace without so much as a warning,” an elderly composer asked incredulously.

“Hey, I gave a warning,” Vera replied, swallowing a slice of cheesecake. She looked at Lily. “We clear to spill the beans, Lily?”

“Stored Momentum and a specially shaped wing,” Lily answered, as she cut up a juicy piece of steak. “Vera here’s published several articles on the physics of airflow, if you want more detail. But the short and simple version is, the Momentum propels the craft forward, and the air pushes up on the wing, enough to overcome gravity.”

“That lifting force depends on a lot of factors. Velocity, angle of attack, and wing shape are the main ones a pilot can control, but Aspects of the surrounding air influence it as well,” Vera continued. As she and the learned guests carried on with the science, the military men set down their wine and leaned closer to Lily.

“How much can you lift? A Pressure Cannon? Saw-shooter?” a chubby mustachioed general asked.

“Gah, just a payload of Glass bombs would be enough!” another butted in. She was leaner, with a bob of silver hair and piercing blue eyes. Her nose looked like it had been broken at least three times.

“Fuck attack, what about reconnaissance? Sweet Yerta, no more having to rely on scryers and mounted scouts, when you could just fly over the enemy camp!” another general added to the cacophony. This one was on the younger side, with streaks of bright red in his wavy brown hair. Despite the youth, there were scars crossing his gleaming brown eyes.

“A portable chiro wouldn’t be too hard to install,” Lily mused, answering that last officer’s question. “But if you’re all asking about the construct I flew today, no. That one was pushing it to lift a second passenger. But,” and she paused to stare pointedly at Lady Rilursa, who was watching with an air of superiority. “I’ll be honest, we cobbled together most of the Nightingale from old construct parts. Most of our commission budget went to a powerful spellburner.”

“What?”

“You heard me. As some of you may know, the amount of isolated Aspect a pymaric can hold depends on its quality grade. The better the First Materials, the more Momentum we can fit in the tank. And that means higher speed, longer range, or heavier load.”

“So what you need is a high-tier First Material, preferably with low density,” the silver-haired general finished. Out of the corner of her eye, Lily caught a big general with short sharp black hair and an odd band around his forehead look into his wine cup for just a little too long. She hardly had time to dwell on that, before Lady Rilursa deigned to join the fray.

“First Bronze is the most practical option, and something that isn’t as dear to come by,” she spoke sharply, as if settling the matter once and for all.

“Anyway, that’s just the Momentum tank. The conductor that draws Momentum from the tank and applies it to the craft, well, that could use good Materials too, but not nearly as much as the tank,” Lily continued.

“Hmph, if you intend to fly that machine into war today, any Aldish Silver wright could set it on fire in a heartbeat, to say nothing of their Twins-damned Plats!”

“Right, well, full Anti-Pymary construction would be obvious for a combat model. As it stands, we salvaged AP metals for the supports and frame, and a First Glass windshield for the pilot. Rest of it was canvas to save weight,” Lily replied. “But I’m not such an idealist to cut corners in combat. It would be worth the extra weight to have the AP armor.”

And so the night went on, liquor and ideas flowing like the Jarla now that it was just true Crescians around (even the usual two-toe servants had been dismissed). By the end of it, the pair came away with every single guest’s Breath contact info, a dozen articles for further purview, and countless ideas for the next aerial construct, some scribbled on napkins.

Lady Rilursa, for her part, offered a new, larger workshop in the capital, and the authority to commission parts from nearby factories (within reason, she asserted). Lily graciously accepted, though she wondered at such generosity, coming from her. She did manage to stave off making their one-night stay permanent though, claiming half-truthfully that they needed to go back in the morning and pack some things for the move. Tomorrow might very well be the last day she and Vera would have to themselves, for a long while.

 

~

 

“No, and that’s final.”

“But…”

“It’s too much risk. Have you ever seen a construct crew burned alive by a breached heat tank? Heard their screams as the isolated high Temperature pours out, and the khert just assigns it to anything nearby? I have, more times than I’d like.”

Lily was arguing with Lieutenant General Dick Bong, the young scar-eyed officer from the royal dinner. Weeks had passed, ideas had been tried and either discarded or implemented, and their new construct was coming together rather well.

Except for the weapons, which was exactly their topic of heated discussion.

“Wanna jump in here, bookworm?” the officer asked Vera, who at the moment had her nose pointedly buried in a report on vliegeng aerial maneuvers.

“I’m with Lily, it’s too heavy and too dangerous,” she replied without looking up. “Already had to install a second tank of First Bronze, to lift the armor. Another Aspect tank, with an entirely separate firing mechanism? Haha. No.”

Bong was running his hands through his hair, groping for a new verbal counterattack, when another officer walked into their open workspace. It took a moment for Lily to recognize the long thin face and short-cropped silver hair.

“Captain Vyte! What are you doing here, er… Sir?” she greeted him in confusion. Out of habit, she stood to attention.

“You barely write anymore,” her commanding officer answered. “At ease, Orel, I thought I’d tell you in person.”

“Tell me what?”

“You’ve been transferred out of 3rd Battalion, and into Research and Development.”  _ Ah, right, my medical leave is due to end in two weeks. _ “Nothing more than formalities, Lily, the truce is still holding. Pity that, I had twenty LP for last week.”

Lily chuckled inside for a bit. She had thirty for a month from now, and Vera had ten for two weeks after that.

“Hmph, I had twice that for one week after the truce was signed,” Bong chimed in. Then he shook his head. “Enough of that, Captain, would you lend me your voice against these two? I’ve been trying to convince them to install a cannon in their damned craft.”

“Mmmm, I’m with Lily on this one,” Vyte answered, after some thought. “Sorry Dick.” He turned to leave. “Best of luck to your endeavors, Lily. Sorry for laughing at you.”

“Well,” Bong spoke in a resigned tone.  _ Good thing I take orders right from the Sonories. Well the Crescian ones. _ “What  _ will _ you do for armament then?”

That took the bravado out of Lily. She had been stumped by the problem recently, trying to find a weapon that could fit on the aircraft yet still effectively drop vliegeng out of the sky. Her combat experience informed her that Aspect cannons and really big swords worked pretty well, but the former was heavy and incredibly dangerous to carry around at a hundred miles per hour. The issues with the latter were so obvious Lily didn’t even put it down on the blackboard.

“Hmph, saw shooter?” she ventured. At that, Vera finally put down her reading material.

“If you’re going to go simple, at least use a better projectile. Like a bigger crossbow bolt,” she said, standing up and walking to the blackboard. She began sketching out a sawblade and a bolt, and airflow lines around each. “You’ll be firing shots while flying at high speed. So you don’t want to catch up to your shot when it slows down due to air resistance. Crossbow bolt is better shaped for that.”

“Tch! Well, looks like you’ve cracked this nut, so I’ll take my leave,” Bong said, turning to leave as well. “Best of luck, ladies.”

“Bye,” Lily said, hardly paying any attention. “Ooh, we could fire the bolts with Momentum. We’re already lifting two tanks of that. Just have to keep the bolts light…”

 

~

 

The massive, beastly head came into view. It had human features like teeth and hair, but those looked horrific next to the inhuman ones, like the jutting jaw or the horns. And then there were the black beady eyes that seemed to consume souls.

_ It probably does, damn Aldish beasts. _

Lily’s finger grazed the trigger set on the front of the control stick. It was wired to the bolt cannon that sat under her feet in the craft’s hull, or more precisely, the charge of Momentum loaded and ready to be applied to the chambered bolt. She didn’t release it just yet though.

Instead, she pulled the stick back just a tiny bit. The thin black crosshairs on the windshield moved up, their center now two inches above the vliegeng’s head (from the view of the pilot).

_ Now _ . She pressed the trigger, sending the loaded Momentum into the waiting bolt. The bolt shot out out of the front of the aircraft, flying straight at the vliegeng at 300  _ evara _ per second.

It passed right in between the black eyes, ripping open a bloodless hole. The “vliegeng” flickered and faded around the bolt as it kept sailing through the physically empty air.

“Seventh time’s the charm, eh Lily?”

Lily whipped her head back to give Vera a death glare. The wright sitting in the rear seat simply stuck out her tongue. The pilot turned back to face the front, so she could see where she was flying the aircraft.

Lily sighed. Vera’s taunt, while irritating, was entirely accurate. Her first shot had too little Momentum, and went too low, missing the target completely. Her second upped the charge, but came on the heels of a hard turn, which results in the bolt veering hard left and missing again. Her next two grazed the teeth and “landed” in the glamour-vliegeng’s forearms. The fifth shot went a little high and passed through the locks of hair, while the sixth went into the beast’s jaw.

All this took several circles and passes in the air around the vliegeng.  _ Too many openings for other vliegeng or sharp-eyed wrights to land a hit on the construct. _

“I just need more practice. No one’s ever tried this before!” Lily whined as she banked toward the airfield.

“Hey, we still got a few more bolts left, and plenty of Momentum this time,” Vera protested, quickly deducing their new course. Lily snorted.

“Alright, chiro Otto and Amie for another target,” she decided. Then, “tell them to make it move this time. Not too quick, maybe a slow climb.” She kept the bank going into a half circle, and pulled the aircraft up as it flew back the way it came.

Why she decided to make this test flight even more challenging, she couldn’t quite say. This was the first time they tried the bolt cannon, having flown the aircraft many times before with an equivalent ballast weight in the nose. Earlier flights tested the same acrobatic abilities that the Nightingale so dramatically demonstrated months ago, this time with colored rings instead of the palace arches. The aviatrixes found out that their heavier craft was less nimble, but not as much as they expected. The new Momentum conductor, which a certain Peaceguard Captain’s adorable daughter Chea shortened to “mo-tor” during one visit, not only sent the greater weight aloft, but managed to exceed the Nightingale’s top speed easily.

The Blackbird, keeping in line with their earlier naming method (to honor the feathered creatures that set Lily and Vera on this path), was almost a new creation entirely, compared to the Nightingale. The struts, spars, frame, and outer surface were all constructed from anti-pymary metal composites now. So were the wings, which enabled Vera to further refine and improve the shape: the sharp rectangular corners gave way to smoother round edges. The First Glass tank gave way to a pair of First Bronze tanks, long and narrow and more of a match to the curved hull. Most importantly, the two tanks held more than ten times the Momentum compared to the Nightingale’s. The hull was no longer a boxy skeleton of metal and wood covered by canvas, but a cigar-like structure with rib-like supports all along the outer length and curved armor plates fitted and welded together for as smooth an outer surface as possible. Most of the construct had been painted a deep and rich black, with streaks of dark red on the nose forming a highly stylized eagle. From below, the hull and wings blended in quite well with the night sky. The landing wheels were now cushioned by hydraulics, and could be retracted once airborne or deployed for landing via a crank in the rear seat.

As Lily began to make the first pass at the now-moving target glamour, she went over all the new devices and instruments the Blackbird now held, especially the ones the Nightingale was never fitted with. Their first true self-propelled aircraft was now sitting in the Clubhouse, tank emptied and motor temporarily disabled.

The tank and speed gauges were old friends now, as was the compass. The mechanical clock and the quicksilver thermometer were familiar, though not in an airborne setting. Vera’s new scholar friends supplied a few new gadgets: an altitude meter and a pair of orientation indicators, to help the pilot keep track of wing bank and nose angle. The bolt cannon did not have anything that fancy at the moment: just lights to indicate if the bolt or charge was loaded. The portable chirograph, with a securely fastened pen, was in the rear seat and had its twin on the ground, currently monitored by the two wagewrights Vera recruited to supply a realistic target for this test flight. 

Lily sent a bolt through that target’s left cheek, missing the nose by a hair. The glamour quivered and began to slowly move toward her. She dived and rolled right just in time to avoid being “struck” by a fat vliegeng arm. She kept the bank steady to take the aircraft through a wide 270-degree turn, bringing the craft on a line aimed squarely at the left side of the beast’s head. Then she climbed up higher than the vliegeng, just for a moment, before sinking into a shallow dive. With the extra speed, she fired another bolt at what would have been the left temple.

The glamour vanished just as the bolt reached it. Lily was stunned, and in her confusion left the aircraft in the dive. Her senses returned, and she pulled back up to avoid a fatal dive into the ground. Part of her wondered why Vera didn’t scream at her to correct that mistake, so Lily glanced back to see her copilot partner unnaturally fixated on the chiro.  _ What in Riv’s name is going on… _

She turned back to see a bright green message in the air:

“Land immediately. Proceed to Breath station. War has begun.”

Lily released the breath she didn’t know she was holding.

“Well shit.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Points to anyone who knows where Dick Bong came from.


	6. Camp Pain

 

They hadn’t even shut off the motor when Lady Rilursa and a gaggle of generals marched into their hangar at the airfield. Evidently they decided a Breath missive was too slow.

“How long can you get that construct ready for battle?” the lady asked, without any greeting.

“At-at least three weeks, my lady,” Vera stammered. Lily could only nod vigorously in agreement. “We-we still need more ammunition for the cannon, today was its first test you see, a-and motor tests and instrument calibration, and-”

“You have two,” the lady cut the poor girl off. “Cresce needs aerial strength.”

The aviatrixes managed to choke down blubbering protests, and simply nodded.

“Good. We’ll notify you of your deployment destination. The Aldish strike is still fresh, it’s too early to tell where you’ll be most needed,  _ Captain _ Orel.”

That last part took a moment to register in Lily’s brain.

“W-wait! My lady,” she shouted, just as they were about to leave. Lady Rilursa paused, causing one of the generals to nearly bump into her.

“Hmm? Spit it out.”

Lily took a deep breath, ignoring the confused look on Vera’s face.

“My partner Vera Elik, I-I couldn’t have accomplished a tenth of what we’ve done without her, I mean...If you’re going to promote me, then you should promote her too,” she argued. “She deserves a rank equal to my own, at the very least.” The fact that she was practically demanding something from the second-most powerful person in the land surprised her. The conviction in her voice as she did so, even more so.

Lady Rilursa looked at her trailing generals, silently asking for objections. None had risen, so she simply turned back and gave a curt nod.

“Very well. Congratulations,  _ Captain _ Vera Elik. I sincerely hope neither of you will disappoint Cresce.”

And that was that.

The following two weeks had been a frantic whirlwind to get the Blackbird on a war footing. The aircraft itself was fine, for the most part. It was gathering the supplies, and the ground support crew, that proved to be a headache. Their newly minted ranks helped, as did their heroic reputation: volunteers poured in, though fewer stayed after learning they wouldn’t actually be flying. Cresce still had only one aerial construct, and Lily and Vera had by far the most experience piloting it.

_ Pity the captain status only goes so far _ . Lily brought her thoughts back to the glassmaker, and the single arrowhead-shaped First Glass Aspect container he had produced since receiving the order of twenty a week ago.

“ _ One?! _ ” she shouted angrily.

The glassmaker didn’t flinch from that yell.  _ Guess he’s heard enough of that lately _ , Lily thought bitterly.

“Hmph, I see you’ve been busy with other orders,” she retorted, waving her arm at the piles of spherical containers all around the shop. Her specially shaped one was alone.

“Indeed I have,  _ Captain _ ,” the glassmaker replied haughtily. “Your order came too late. We’ve been making the usual kind of container for the Army, and then you and your friend come in and ask for this?” He gestured at the arrowhead. “Took me too much time to make this shape. Time I should have spent making a dozen bottles for our wrights.”

“Hey, Captain Elik is a wright, and so am I.”

“Get your head out of the clouds!” he snapped. “Argh, if you’re still here in a week, I might have two more. No promises!”

Lily snapped the wool-padded case shut and grumbled something uncouth.  _ Twins-damn it, we’re due to march out with Lieutenant General Marc Slim tomorrow _ . She had the grace not to storm out of the shop, nor slam the door on her way out. She hoped without a trace of envy that Vera had better luck with her acquisitions.

It turned out she did, though that was not a high bar to clear.

“Concentrated Sleepleaf, mixed with just a bit of adhesive!” she announced, gingerly setting a large jar of bright green liquid on the table. “Courtesy of Her Majesty’s organic chemists, we have enough for seven or eight bolt heads.” Her joy dimmed when she saw the look on Lily’s face, and the small case on the table.

“One Glass head,” she spat out, tapping the case. She sighed. “The construct can hold twenty bolts in the feed. So that’s one bolt loaded with Aspect, seven coated with poison, and a dozen plain ol’ pointy stabby ones.”

“Eh, not too shabby.” Vera opened the case and took out the head. “What Aspect should we load?”

“I’m thinking Pressure?”

“Ha, those vliegeng are in for a blast.”

 

~

 

Lily stood still in the bustling army camp for a moment, taking in the sights and sounds and smells. It had been well over a year since she had gone to war, and she felt something akin to meeting an old friend who fell out of touch. She looked over at Vera, who was instead feeling what every green soldier felt the first time they walk into a camp: sensory overload, confusion, and a good dose of nervousness. The wright was wearing her new white cloak, along with the badge that marked her as a captain. So Lily clapped her hand on her friend’s shoulder, which knocked her off balance and almost sent her into the path of a saddlehound. The Peaceguard trooper mounted to that hound glared at the hapless wright, sighed, and went on his way.

“Alright newbie, just stay close to me. I’ll hold your hand if you want,” Lily teased. To her surprise, Vera actually grabbed her hand and held on tight. Lily hadn’t seen her this scared and tense since that mad flight in the Nightingale.  _ Huh, she’s kinda cute like this. Guess I never noticed because I was too busy flying.  _ Lily stared at her partner for a moment, searching for that spark of curiosity that eventually propelled the two of them to great heights.

They stood together, hand in hand in the midst of organized chaos for a little longer. Then Lily pointed with her free hand at a large pavilion some ways off, with the red and black Crescian standard raised high and proud.

“Our new commanding officer is waiting for us, Captain Elik,” she said to Vera. The use of her rank snapped her out of her trance, and the wright let go of Lily’s hand. Lily watched as she took a deep breath and straightened her posture.

“After you, Captain Orel.”

The aviatrixes entered Lieutenant General Slim’s tent with such swagger that the ambient camp gossip fell silent. Then a portly middle-aged man with silver sideburns and a ragged graying beard stood and walked over. Judging from the uniform, Lily deduced that this was their new commanding officer.  _ Oh the irony. _

“So,” he bellowed, enough to make the pages and servants flinch, but Lily and Vera stood firm. What had they to fear, when gravity itself couldn’t hold them down?

“This is what Her Majesty sends me,” the general continued, his face as hard as granite despite his height requiring him to look up at Lily. “A couple of mad cloud chasers and an untested metal shit with wings!”

Lily simply kept staring at her new commanding officer, refusing to budge an inch, but she could feel Vera begin to crack. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Vera’s lips wavering slightly.

Then Lt General Slim cracked into a wide smile, and bellowed in roaring laughter this time.

“Ha!” he shouted, scaring the servants again. “You two have balls of steel alright, figuratively speaking. Guessed as much when I was watching your stunts at the capital, but I wanted to judge face-to-face.” He turned to face an orderly who wasn’t curled up in a ball. “You! Bring us a fine tankard of mead, and…” he turned back to the aviatrixes “cigars?”

“No thank you, Sir!” Vera replied, never betraying how close she came to yielding.

“None for me either,” Lily followed. She had tried the pipe a few times, and it didn’t quite hold the appeal her male comrades claimed.  _ And besides, a pilot’s gotta keep her head clear and focused. Can’t smoke to get that _ .

“Ha, alrighty then. No cigars. Just drinks tonight.” Slim gestured for a pair of chairs to be brought over, and the two took their seats and their drinks. Vera carefully nursed her mug while trying not to look like she was nursing it. Lily simply quaffed a third of her mug down. She wiped the foam off her mouth and looked around at the other officers at Slim’s table.

She counted three construct pilots, two Peaceguard officers (a captain and a lieutenant, though obviously not Captain Toma and his Lieutenant Elka), four cavalry captains, and six infantry sergeants. Including Lily and Vera and General Slim, that made eighteen at the table.

Lily’s attention drifted to what was on the table: a fairly detailed map of northern Cresce. The Jarla was easy to recognize, running along the bottom. A dashed line near the top marked the border with Alderode, at least when the peace was still good. Arrayed between those two were numerous tokens, shaped like snakes or dogs to mark the location of Aldish or Crescian armies. The presence of a small aircraft-shaped token lifted Lily’s spirits.

“Ahem.” Slim and Lily looked at Vera, who had begun to study the map too. “I see few Aldish markers, and most of ours sit south of the Jarla. Except…” her finger shifted over to a region in the northwest, where Aldish and Crescian markers were dangerously close to mingling. The words “Litriya Shrine” were written close by.

“Aldish air raids,” one of the construct pilots spat out. Lily recognized the insignia of the 7th Construct Battalion.  _ Good outfit _ .

“Captain Gert, you could at least elaborate for our new guests,” the Peaceguard captain said.

“No need, Captain…?”

“Captain Karl Loch, Her Majesty’s Royal Peaceguard. You need not introduce yourselves, Captains Orel and Elik. Your reputation precedes you.”

“General Slim’s got the right o’ it,” one of the cavalry captains added. “Wild trick you pulled at the palace. Now how’s about you do the same to those damned snakes?”

“That is the plan,” Lily replied smugly. She saw no reason to mention the lone Pressure-head bolt they had, or the comparatively light armament of the Blackbird.  _ Hopefully Vera can make up for it somewhat. She’s got a full belt of Aspects and materials now. _

“That most certainly is not!” Slim protested. “Captain Aria, you’d risk Cresce’s only flying construct for a few more dead vliegeng?! Tsk, that’s why I’m the general here.”

“Lieutenant general,” one of the infantry officers grumbled.

“Sir, the flying construct is only our fourth, and I doubt we’ll be getting reinforcements anytime soon,” another construct pilot spoke.  _ There were only three MPCs here before us? That’s it?! _

Lily’s face must have shown her thoughts, because Captain Gert spoke again.

“One Fireloper, piloted by yours truly. Two Rockwalks. And now, er, what is your construct called again?”

“Blackbird, Model 1,” Vera answered. “Why so few constructs, against such hordes from Alderode?”

General Slim snorted into his mug.

“General Bell sent his  _ east _ , to quell some ‘trouble’ in Ethelmik. The bulk of his troops and machines, gone to some failing border town with Captain Hetr!” he explained bitterly. “And, no offence to you lot, but that leaves us with little better than dregs.”

_ Fuckin’ Riv, what have we gotten ourselves into? A mood this low isn’t good for a high-flying pilot. _

“What can we do to help then?” Vera offered, trying to bring some optimism to the table. Now Lily could see how paltry Slim’s army was, compared to the aerial incursions. Memories of Farnow Vale came flooding back, and Lily feared a repetition on a larger scale. Even Port Morstorben seemed poised to fall, should the Aldish prevail.

Slim set down his mug and began to smile. The feeling was a little contagious, and Lily couldn’t help wonder what mischief this man was up to.

“Reconnaissance flights. Every night, as we march north,” he answered.  _ Damn it, Dick Bong was right. _ “Until now, we had nothing that could even come close to a vliegeng’s speed. But I wager your aircraft might be a tad faster even. Sweep the skies and keep an eye on the ground too, in case those heretics are moving men in their beasts’ shadows. I want to know where those assholes are!”

“Huzzah!” the Peaceguard lieutenant cheered. “We’ll hunt them down and send them running home without balls!”

“Don’t be so hasty, Lieutenant Zara. With our troops, we need the element of surprise. So, night flights only, and we’ll keep abreast of the local storm clouds for cloaking spells. I don’t want those bastards to know until our swords are on their throats!”

“Ha!” Lily exclaimed, chugging the rest of her mead. “You’ve got a stout set of stones too, General Slim! We’ll scout from the skies for you then, ain’t that right Vera?”

“Sure, let’s see how those Alds like it when they pick on someone their own altitude. They’re not wriggling out of this one.”


	7. Midnight Khert-esies

 

The night air was incredibly refreshing, so high and far away from the stench of a traveling army. Lily hadn’t really encountered such an absence in the earlier flights, but so far from any large body of troops and practically skimming the upper edge of the khert, she could really breath it in.

Or try to, anyway. The air was thinner up here, exactly as Vera predicted. They would have to see about some sort of breathing apparatus.  _ Wait, why? Go high enough and the khert stops, so the pymaric motor stops too. What runs out first, the khert or breathable air? _

This was the third nocturnal flight they had taken so far. The first two had revealed almost nothing: scattered vliegeng corpses from where local militia managed a decent defense, burnt villages where they did not. Slim’s host dearly needed some good news after the Breath station at Earlstradt went dark; the last report told of a particularly large air raid nearby. The worst assumption had taken hold in the war council: the line had been cut, by accident or by design.

Slim had been ordered to reinforce the defenders at Earlstradt, and they had been marching in that direction day and night, using rain clouds and nightfall to hide themselves from the presumed enemy nearby. For the past two days, the Crescian troops were only able to rest when Lily and Vera were making their scouting flight in the dead of night. Since taking off and landing required a smooth enough strip of ground, the host couldn’t really go anywhere for those few hours. While they napped and ate warm food, the aviatrixes easily covered more than forty miles each way in the Blackbird, combing the landscape with a telescope and whatever the two of them could sense through their palm ports. The latter would have been much more effective if either of them was a short-lived Plat, but Vera figured she could sense the spellpower needed to hide a vliegeng horde or a thousand men without the Dammakhert’s “gift.”

Off in the distance, a massive storm raged around Litriya Shrine, winds howling and beating against the massive statue of Yerta. The turbulent air forced Lily to fly several miles out to avoid the nasty weather, and only after two days’ march were the aviatrixes in a position to scout in earnest north of the Jarla.

They had just crossed the river when Vera winced and started scribbling a message on the chiro.

“What is it, dear?” Lily asked, keeping her eyes on the flight.

“There’s a wrecked construct and dead vliegeng about a dozen miles downriver,” she answered, still writing what Lily assumed was a report to base camp detailing the same. “I think I know what happened to Earlstradt’s defenders.”

“Fuck.”  _ And when we were so close to reinforcing them too. Another day’s march could have made a huge difference. _

“And that’s what Slim just said.” The other end of their chiro sat in the lieutenant general’s tent while the aircraft was airborne. Slim wanted updates immediately.

“Orders?”

“He says to keep searching. Thinks there’s a chance the Aldish are still near. I think he wants to get some bit of victory out of this.”

“Never discount morale,” Lily admonished, bringing the craft closer to the ground. “Keep the girl cloaked, and look for hound tracks or flattened grass trails. Vliegeng don’t leave a damned trail in the air, but ground troops do.”

They kept flying and searching, navigating mainly by dead reckoning, with the Jarla and Litriya serving as highly useful landmarks.

Some time later, Lily noticed a faint wisp of smoke to the north, near a bunch of hills.

“Hey Vera, that look like smoke to you?” she asked. She glanced back to see her copilot peering through the telescope.

“Fly in closer. It could just be a village nestled behind those hills. But that smoke looks fresh, so if anything it’s a lead.”

“No problem.” She maneuvered the aircraft toward the hills, keeping it in a bank so Vera could have a better view.

She did not need it.

“Oh. Shit,” the two of them said in unison.

 

Crammed tightly between the bottom of the hills and a dense forest was an Aldish camp, cleverly concealed by the geography. Indeed, nothing shorter than a Fireloper could have spotted the tents past the forest or the hills, and such a heavy construct would have gotten stuck in the muddy swamps nearby, easy prey for vliegeng. Lily begrudgingly gave the enemy commander respect for choosing this position: well-hidden, easily defensible from land assaults, and readily reinforced by air. That respect wasn’t much though.  _ He trusts too much in his command of the air. Why should barbarian northerners be the only ones to fly? _

“I see their standards,” Vera reported. “There’s two sets, I think one’s got a gold lion on green?”

“Keep our cloak up, damn it! There could be scouts in the forest!”

Lily heard Vera hiss and chant the commands to strip Opacity from the Blackbird. Even as she did that, though, the pilot began to consider the lion standard.

“It’s those damned god-killer heretics, the...uh…the Lions of Mercy!” she exclaimed, after a moment. “Must be after the shrine, those fucks.”

“Tirna take them!” Vera cursed, having finished her incantation.

“I’m flying in closer for a better look. One report to Slim, then we turn back home,” Lily decided. Already she was considering her next moves.  _ Cavalry could reach this place in a day of hard riding, constructs and foot two. But a land assault will be damned tough. Slim would prefer to entrench himself between the camp and the shrine, ambush the raiders and keep them from moving farther south. _

“I count nine vliegeng, tents enough for maybe a thousand men, and…” Vera paused. “Fly in closer!”

“Aye!” Lily dropped a few dozen  _ evara _ and brought them closer still, passing over the swamps.

“Shit!” Vera cursed again.  _ Starting to become a proper soldier now, she is. _

“What?”

“They’ve got a storehouse, with bales of frostgiants. Baelar’s balls, they must be basing their beasts here instead of Alderode!”

“Raiding cattle from hardworking Crescians, no doubt. Those snakefuckers,” Lily finished. She had read up on the damned beasts too, and they did need some meat every now and then.  _ Still, to transport the plant part of their diet so far south...why? _ “Chiro Slim, we’ve seen enough.” She banked her aircraft, intending to turn back southwest over the forest before they could reach the hills.

A bright flash exploded mere  _ evara _ behind them, and when Lily’s eyes recovered and glanced down, she saw the forest below light up with torches and spell-light. She spared a look toward the hill camp, and saw the vliegeng begin to stir.

“We’ve been spotted!” Vera shouted, now frantically scratching out her report and trying to strip Opacity again.

“Forget the spell! Glamours are useless now!” Lily interrupted.  _ But hey, at least our black paint isn’t. _ “We need to fall back! Flash them back, we’ll do better with them blind as a fuckin’ bat.”

Another bright flash lit up the night, and Lily could see the Aldish swarming the forest more clearly now, their wrights no doubt gathering Edges from the leaves to hurl. Unfortunately, that flash meant that they could see  _ her _ now too. She throttled the motor and prayed the dazzle threw off their aim.

“They’re sending all their beasts up! Augh, there’s a big ‘un up front, blue with a rose belly,” Vera shouted. Lily spared a quick glance back.  _ Bloody Riv, should have installed a mirror. _ She spotted the blue beast instantly, its handler straddling the neck right behind the shorn horns. He was dressed in green, with light leather armor and an exposed head of messy blonde hair that reminded Lily of a mop.  _ Pissmop blondie… _ Behind him was a younger lad with light olive skin and the sense to wear a helmet, long spear in hand. There were more men on the beast’s back, but Lily didn’t have the time to study them. As she turned her head back, her peripheral vision confirmed her fear: the other vliegeng were lifting more riders, over a dozen for the bigger ones. Too many had lit up palms and bright red Aspect bottles.

“Time to go!” she screamed, a bit unnecessarily. She pulled back the stick and climbed up to outrange the wrights on the ground. And not a moment too soon: Edged vectors shot up into the sky, piercing the air their craft had occupied minutes earlier. Lily had to believe the Blackbird’s black belly made them invisible to the enemy on the ground. She would have a hard enough time with the airborne forces soon enough.

 

The Blackbird tore up up and away from the now hectic forest, heading on a southwesterly course toward the Jarla. Nine Aldish vliegeng were in hot pursuit, the remaining Aldish ground forces rapidly becoming irrelevant to the high-altitude chase. They followed anyway, despite being more impotent than the King of Sharteshane.

Lily’s trigger finger began to itch. She and Vera, convinced by the wrights in their ground crew, kept their sole Pressure bolt chambered and ready in the cannon. It was both a bold move and a matter of safety: the bolt made for a powerful first strike, and in case of a bad landing, could be discarded quickly so as not to detonate and destroy the craft (and its pilots) in a hard impact. The first was obviously the more pertinent reason at the moment.

“Fired off the report!” Vera shouted over the howling wind. “Aaaaand receipt acknowledged.”

“What’s Slim saying?”

“...I think he’s still writing. And erasing. And...ah! ‘Readying troops for battle. Lure vliegeng into an ambush. Fly well, captains.’”

Lily fell silent as she crunched the numbers.

“Fuckin’ Tirna!” she cursed, when she finished.

“Slim won’t be ready in time!” Vera concurred, having come to the same conclusion as Lily.  _ Constructs outnumbered two to one, and these goats are bristling with troops. It’ll be a slaughter. Farnow Vale all over again… _ Lily shut her eyes.  _ No. _

“Charge the cannon!” she ordered.

“What?!” Vera protested. The order started to register. “You can’t be serious…”

“If we fly back now, we’ll just lead these bastards toward Slim. And it’ll be a bloodbath, Vera.”

“But just us, against that?!”

As if to drive her point home, the vliegeng roared a hideous battle cry, and they heard faint fragments of Old Tainish.  _ No, only one kind of wright has that kind of range… _ Lily throttled the motor.

An even fainter hiss, then the air behind the Blackbird cracked and exploded with reassigned Pressure. The aircraft had outrun the spell by a few  _ evara _ , but the shockwave still rattled the hull.  _ A direct hit would have been… _

“Ha! That fool Plat can’t aim!” Lily boasted, despite the mild ringing in her ears. “I say again, charge the fucking cannon!”

“Sonova…fine! Just try not to get us killed!”

“Dearie, you’re a soldier in the service of the greatest nation in Kasslyne, and so am I. We don’t have the luxury of dodging death!”

“No Lily, but I bet you have the skill,” Vera retorted. “And we can’t train new pilots if we’re dead!” She paused for a second. “Cannon’s charged, 50% above standard.”

Lily threw back her head and cackled as she put in a burst of speed and rolled the craft into a tight 180-degree turn.

“Alright blondie!” she taunted, the  _ Soud _ vliegeng handler sticking out on his bright blue mount. She maneuvered the craft to bring him into her crosshairs. “Let’s fucking dance!”

Lily had only attempted this tactic once, and that was against a fake vliegeng. But, then again, they were all in unsounded territory. Until now, no Crescian soldier had ever tried to attack a flying target...while flying at high speeds themselves.

She quickly pulled the craft up, narrowly dodging a flung fireball, and immediately dipped into a shallow dive. Her finger pulled the trigger, and the precious Pressure-head bolt shot out toward the blue vliegeng’s handler. The bolt had barely cleared the barrel when Lily made the dive steeper and weaved right then left.

She looked up in time to see the blue vliegeng swiftly drop out of the bolt’s path. Behind it, another pair of beasts, one bright mottled green and the other a dull yellow, swerved left and right to evade the deadly projectile.

The fat gray one behind them, however, wasn’t fast enough. The bolt struck it right between its shoulder spikes, and released its stored Pressure to devastating effect. The blast decapitated the vliegeng and pulverized its handler. The other seven passengers were thrown off their feet, and then off the body of the now-dead beast. Five of them plummeted through the night sky, screaming to the deaf ears of gravity, but two managed to reverse their Momentum and grab onto another vliegeng, their comrades pulling them to safety.

_ Ok blondie, not bad. You’re still down one beastie though, and I’ve got nineteen bolts and all night. _

“Welcome to Crescian skies, you assholes!” Lily roared at her foes. “Vera, load a Sleeper! Double-charge this one!”

“Aye aye, cap...” She paused for a fraction of a second. “Heads up! Fire from above!”

“Damn it!”

Lily weaved the craft in a frantic zigzag, threading around the Temperature and Edge Aspects raining down from the wrights above them.  _ We need to regain the high ground...er sky. _ She pulled the stick back as far as it would go, and the Blackbird began to climb steeply. The nearly vertical wings couldn’t generate lift now, but the motor was programmed to aim Momentum by the nose, and it was aimed up now. Lily simply throttled the motor again, sending them soaring almost straight up past the rear of the vliegeng flock and into the clouds above.

“Nononono, damn it, straighten out!” Vera cried. “We’ll burn too much Momentum fighting gravity this way!”

“Buzzkill,” Lily replied, but she did level out the aircraft, so now they seemed to be floating on a fluffy gray sea. They could hardly see their enemies now, except through small gaps in the clouds. But the Alds couldn’t see the Blackbird either, the black underbelly blending in against the night sky. For now, Lily had a precious advantage.

“Roll back that charge to standard, dearie!” she ordered. “I don’t think we’ll need a double.”

“Done,” Vera replied, after a pause. Lily kept her eyes peeled at the gaps as she circled around, looking for the  _ Soud _ handler. She strongly suspected that he was the commanding officer of the formation, if not of the entire force that Lily and Vera found in those hills.  _ Drop him, and the Alds will lose cohesion. Then we can pick them off at our leisure, Slim’s machines and I… _

“Oi, Plat on a yellow beastie, a hundred  _ evara _ out at three o’clock!” Vera reported. Lily held back a sigh. As much as she wanted to kill the damned  _ Soud _ , a  _ Hethllot _ wright was a much more immediate threat. It would be ideal to save the Sleeper currently chambered, and use a regular bolt to push the pale Plat into the khert’s embrace. But they never had time to implement a bolt-swapping mechanism, only the ability to choose which bolt to load next.

Lily made a quarter-turn to the right and dived through the clouds. The yellow vliegeng suddenly came into view as they broke through, and Lily flinched and fired the cannon. She began to curse, when she noticed that the bolt didn’t miss. Instead it buried itself into the beast’s midsection.

“Vera, keep that wright down! His ride won’t last long now!” Lily barked from the front seat. Vera fumbled around in her pockets and drew out a handful of pine needles.

“<Heed Me Great Khert! Take the Sharpness from the pine needles in contact with my left hand…>” she watched the men on the yellow beast reach forward to try to pull the poison-coated bolt out.  _ Too little too late, _ Vera thought, as she calculated the distance between them and the Blackbird to be twenty-four  _ evara _ once the spell finished.

She flung the points at the flagging vliegeng’s back, skewering a couple riders. The Plat was quick though, and caught one of the Aspects before it could land. Vera’s breath caught in her throat.  _ No no no… _

Then the poisoned vliegeng dropped out from under him, and the Plat stumbled and fell off its back. Vera watched his pale white hands scramble for a handhold in the empty air, the Sharp Aspect still in his palm. His mouth hung open in a big ‘O,’ and Vera thought him dead until he began to move his mouth.  _ Sweet Yerta, from this angle, he looks so young. _ But he could not speak a spell to reverse his Momentum, not with the first spell still incomplete. He flung the Sharp Aspect too late, and it only pierced the scrawny hind leg of the falling vliegeng. Then both man and beast slammed into the ground with a sickening thud.

“That’s two!” she yelled toward the front. Part of her was revolted at the scene, all of which happened in the span of a minute. The other more pragmatic part of her adjusted their odds of survival upwards.

“Ahahaha, this night is getting better and better!” Lily replied, and Vera once again submitted to having a madwoman piloting this construct. She had been airborne with Lily at the controls for hundreds of hours since that first terrifying flight to Fluirstadt, but somehow she still ended up surprised with her heart skipping way too many beats.  _ Does this happen to all new soldiers in their first battle? _

Lily spun the craft into a barrel roll, dodging another flurry of Aspects and shaking Vera out of her stream of thought.

“Any more Plats? We’ll make real ghosts out of ’em tonight, won’t we?” Lily asked confidently, as if they weren’t hurtling through the sky at a hundred miles per hour and evading attacks from an enemy that wasn’t  _ that _ much slower.. They had climbed higher now, though still under the clouds.

From this vantage point, Vera scanned the men on the beasts’ backs, looking for that telltale pale complexion. It was easier said than done, in the darkness of the night, though the flares of spellfire helped. She saw men trying to secure themselves to harnesses, with whatever bits of rope they had. She didn’t see any more Plats though.

“Nope,” she reported back to Lily. The Blackbird could now circle around the enemy, out of range of their wrights. Vera doubted Lily would be satisfied with such a safe and dull tactic.

“Load another Sleeper! Double-charge!” the pilot ordered. “Which one’s next?”

Vera quickly studied the remaining seven vliegeng, trying to gauge which one was the most dangerous, and which one was the most vulnerable.

“Beige one, near the rear!” she finally decided. It was just a little slower than its brethren, much slower than the big blue one, and its backside was laden with fourteen men, not counting the handler. Such good luck, Vera whispered a prayer to Baelar.

“Nice!” Lily hollered. She pushed the speed higher and raised the angle of attack, slipping out of a turn and keeping straight, away from the vliegeng.  _ Oh come on, not now… _

The Blackbird went vertical, then past the vertical, and Vera was upside down and staring at the vliegeng down below. Lily finished the half loop, rolled the aircraft upright, and dove for the target. Vera heard the pymaric cannon hiss, and watched the Sleepleaf-coated bolt zip toward the vliegeng she singled out.

The handler of that beast nudged it into a drop, but not in time to prevent the bolt from punching clean through his armor and chest. Vera could see the wave of panic ripple through the remaining riders as the handler slumped forward, dead. Then she saw two of them open pockets on their belts to draw out Aspects to retaliate.

“Watch out!” she warned Lily.

“I see them!” the pilot replied, and she sent the aircraft into a steep dive, narrowly avoiding the Pressure blasts and fireballs cast by the wrights. “Damn, load another Sleeper, triple charge this time!”

“Why the fuck triple?” Vera asked, even as she adjusted the pymaric to add even more Momentum to the next bolt.

“For this,” Lily replied, and she pulled the aircraft up again, aiming at the massive purple belly of the beast. She leveled out a little bit, so the cannon was now aimed at the back of the jaw. Lily let the super-charged bolt rip, and this time it struck the beast’s throat. Vera could see a shudder passing through the length of the goat-snake, and the beast began to drop.

“I think you wasted that one too,” Vera commented.

“I hit him, didn’t I?”

“Wasted the Sleeper, I mean. We’re down to four.”

“...Fair point. Load a regular bolt next.”

As Vera switched the bolt feed, she heard Lily curse again.

“Ah, fuck you!”

Vera looked up to see two other vliegeng falling back to support the dying beige one with their unsettlingly human-like forearms. On the right of the large beast was the medium-sized bright green vliegeng, its black-haired handler bellowing Tainish at his mount to stay steady as riders leapt from the sagging vliegeng onto the healthy one. On the left, a small red vliegeng was struggling with both arms to keep its bigger brethren aloft, its ruddy-faced handler and five passengers also struggling to stay on the trembling beast.

“Really wish we had comrades right now,” Vera moaned.

“And share the fun? Nah.”

Even as she made that remark, Lily felt an intense need for support.  _ Those three beasts would be perfect targets for Pressure cannons, even ground-based ones. _ But Slim’s three constructs were still dozens of miles away, and outnumbered two-to-one. Worse yet, the Alds still had a lot of airborne wrights, despite the loss of two vliegeng and the impending death of a third. Pymary enabled them to recover from a fall (though not always, as the late Plat demonstrated).

Lily swung the Blackbird out from under the awkward triplet, flying up and to the right. The larger green vliegeng was the better target: if they took him down, the smaller red beast would not be able to hold up the beige one.  _ Ech, that one doesn’t look great. Sleepleaf in the veins and blood practically pouring out of the throat wound. _ She began to circle around back toward the three vliegeng. From this distance, she could see about half a dozen riders left on the beige beast, some trying to drag the handler’s corpse down to the green vliegeng’s back. The latter was starting to sag from the weight of almost twenty armed men.  _ Now or never _ .

“Vera, dear,” she called back. “Think you can manage the wrights on that green beast?”

“Fuck no!”

“Too bad!”

Lily aimed the nose at the green vliegeng’s head, keeping the speed steady.  _ Come on, come on _ . Her hand gripped the throttle, but stayed still for now as she watched the riders like a hawk.

She heard bits of Old Tainish, and saw the flash of palm ports.  _ Now! _ Lily pulled back the stick with one hand and rammed the throttle forward with the other. The Blackbird jerked up, and not a second too soon, as a barrage of fire and Pressure and Edge vectors whizzed by under.

Before the enemy could launch another volley, Lily brought the nose back down and fired a bolt at the green vliegeng. Another mingled verse of Old Tainish reached her ears, and she dove before she could see the results of her attack.

“Boarders!”

Lily spared a glance back up, and saw a most unwelcome sight: a callous wright had stripped the Solidarity from the now-dead beige vliegeng, and more than a dozen furious Aldishmen were leaping through the empty space toward the Blackbird. Several were covered in what was likely First Material armor, and all of them were armed to the teeth. A few brave wrights stayed on the slowly-falling green vliegeng, redirecting the Momentum of the diving Aldish toward the aircraft. Curiously, the handler’s seat was empty.

“Ahahahahaha! I’m not that kind of gal!” Lily jeered, and dove steeper still.

“No wait!” Vera protested. “We’re too close to the ground!”

Lily looked at the altitude meter, and her windshield view.  _ Well shit _ . She pulled the stick back, and the Blackbird leveled out. The gap between it and the falling Alds shrank.  _ Fine, let’s give them each their turn. _

She rolled the craft hard, putting the wings nearly vertical. An Ald in a ornate lion-mane helm and armor went right by her.  _ Heh, the First armor means your own wrights can’t target you either. _

“Enjoy the fall!” she taunted, and the Ald could only froth in rage as he fell to the hard earth. The aircraft began to fall as well, and Lily realized that the vertical wings couldn’t generate lift in this position. She reluctantly leveled out the wings and throttled the motor.

“ _Uflikh_ _ssallega_!” an outraged male voice roared. The Blackbird shook as the Ald landed on the nose in front of the windshield. He wore only light leather, and had the black hair and light skin of the Jets. “You’ll pay for my Rahella, bitch!” he screamed, brandishing a battleaxe in one hand and a sword in the other. _Oh there’s the handler_ , Lily thought serenely.

“Ha! <The sky is mine, goat-fucker>!” she fired back in her own Tainish. Lily pulled the stick far back and throttled the motor hard. The Blackbird shot up again, and the Jet went tumbling down the hull just before his axe could strike. He slammed his head into the windshield and dropped left, where the metal wing promptly crushed his ribcage. The broken body fell away, though not before Vera managed to snag the Edge Aspects from his weapons.

“Alright Vera, load up a plain bolt and hang on to those Edges, we’re gonna show those boys a real good time!”

She cut back on the speed and leveled out the craft. Down below, the Aldish were regrouping. The beige vliegeng was already being core-leeched and the green one already hit the ground. The wrights, however, had all gathered on the back of a particularly large vliegeng, skin eggshell white with violet speckles all over. Half had Aspects ready to loose, and the others were launching more attackers from the other four beasts. Lily swallowed hard: the damned  _ Soud _ had too much sense, and his blue beast and another olive green one were holding position over the massive white beast. The five vliegeng just became an aerial fortress.

“We gotta break up that formation!” Lily screamed back.

“Slim’s Fireloper would be really nice right now,” Vera wryly replied.

“We’ll have to make do!”

She started to dive.

Vera stared at the formidable formation that was growing larger in her vision. The enemy had adapted to the new threat, quicker than she would have preferred. Lily’s diving attacks were growing predictable, and they must have guessed the construct was out of Pressure bolts. The white beast had at least a dozen wrights on its back, concentrating their pymaric strength and making it easier to coordinate spells.  _ Like now… _

A curtain of fire erupted in front of the Blackbird, and Lily couldn’t evade it. The wrights had covered too much area with their combined barrage.

She didn’t even bother.  _ That lunatic _ . Instead she sent the craft charging straight through the flames, pumping more speed as she went. The madness had method though, Vera had to admit: the high speed forced more wind around the craft, suppressing the flames that caught on. The Blackbird’s all-metal hull saved it from the fiery fate that would have taken the Nightingale: few flames had actually stuck, though the aircraft was now quite toasty.

That left the aviatrixes to face the six vicious Aldishmen soaring upwards at them, the wind tearing away their lurid battle cries.  _ Sonuva… _

“<Heed me Great Khert!>” Vera flung out the Edge Aspects she had saved, cutting down three Alds. The vectors went out when they struck the First Material armor of a fourth and fifth.

One of those armored Alds managed to grab onto the inner front edge of the left wing. Lily, in her infinite insanity, struck another with the nose. That Aldishman was gripping the hull with both hands, trying to hang on to both the aircraft and his heavy mace, his legs dangling in empty air.

“Alright fine!” Lily laughed. “Let’s see how your pecker likes this!” She fired the bolt right into the man’s nether region. Vera could clearly hear his groan of pain, and said a silent prayer to Yerta despite the lion insignia on his armor. The mace slipped out of his hands and plummeted out of sight.

“Oi, bastard!” Lily cried, when she glanced back and saw the second Ald hanging on. “Get your hands off our baby!”

The Ald merely growled something that was lost on the wind. Lily rolled back and forth, trying to shake the persistent Aldishman. His left hand still gripped a stout poleaxe, and Vera was still in its deadly reach.

“Vera, a little help?!”

“His armor!”

“Aim for the eyes!”  _ Oh _ . Vera condensed the Temperature from the stray flames and surrounding heated air through the man’s exposed eyeslit and into his actual eyeballs. The lion helmet burst into flames from the inside, and smoke began to pour out of the hole.

“Aurgh! Fuckin’ tin can slutssss….” the Ald cursed. His hand finally slipped off the wing. “Ssael save me!” he cried as he fell, eyes still burning.  _ The godkiller can’t help you _ , Vera thought grimly, taking pity as he struck the ground.

“Load a Sleeper, dear!” Lily ordered. “I think I’ve got an opening!” Vera flicked the switch, despite her confusion.  _ That dead Ald is still on the nose. _ Then the pilot’s intention became clear.

The wrights couldn’t get any spells past the dead man’s armor, and the Blackbird was close enough where another curtain of fire would hit a vliegeng as well. Lily had shrunk their targetable area to just the thin edge of the wings. And she could move those a lot faster than she could move the hull.

“I think Blondie needs to get his head out of the clouds, don’t you?” Lily said. She shifted the nose toward the blue vliegeng, just as a lucky Pressure blast knocked the corpse off the nose. The cannon had a clear shot, but they lost their erstwhile spell-shield. Lily fired anyway.

The near suicidal bravery of the Aldish thwarted her attack. One of them launched themselves into the path of the poisoned bolt, taking it right through their side and into their torso. The man was dead from the injury alone, but the blue vliegeng received no more than a light bruise from the body striking its side.

“Damn it!” Lily swore. “Well if you fools are so eager to die for that  _ Soud _ …Vera! Another bolt!” She put in a burst of speed to evade a Pressure blast and rolled a hard right to evade the arm of the dark red vliegeng. The  _ Soud _ handler waved his arms and barked an order at the red vliegeng’s handler (Vera realized now he was a Copper), and both beast and man gave chase. To her mild relief, Vera could see only three additional passengers instead of the five she spotted earlier.

“We’ve got company!” Vera cried out. She reached into her belt for a chunk of granite, and sent its Solidarity at the pursuing vliegeng. The small red beast was nearly as nimble as the Blackbird, though, and evaded the spell. Lily couldn’t fire the cannon rearward either. All she could do was climb faster.

It wasn’t enough. One Ald managed to hook a grapple onto the aircraft’s tail. He was immediately yanked off his feet and into the air behind the Blackbird as Lily sped up again.

“Lily! I’m out of Edges!”

“It’s alright, I’ve got another idea, just keep him still for a minute, will you?”

Despite everything, that gave Vera some renewed confidence. So far, Lily’s ideas had proven decently effective, if sometimes insane. Vera glanced back to see that the red vliegeng had strayed far from its pack, and the range of the enemy wrights. She turned her gaze toward the Ald on the rope, and saw him hanging on with one arm, the other holding a curved sword. So she began condensing moonlight and throwing it into his face.

Meanwhile, Lily had brought the aircraft into a extremely tight left turn.

“Blind that beast!” she barked back. Vera hastily altered the coordinates of her current spell, and the flash forced both the vliegeng and handler to shut their eyes for a moment.

It was enough. Lily’s tight turn became a sort of skid, missing the vliegeng by a few  _ evara _ . But the Ald hanging on didn’t, and the turn sent him careening into his fellow countrymen, knocking them off their mount. Vera saw his sword cut through another Ald’s arm.  _ Wait, Lily’s idea has probably played out now. _ She stripped the Edge Aspect from the still-bloody sword and used some of it to cut the rope, saving the rest in a bottle for later.

Lily pulled the aircraft out of the skid and into a proper turn right, aiming now at the lone handler on the red vliegeng. His comrades were already dropping fast out of the sky, too far from their wrights for saving. The cannon hissed and fired, and the bolt grazed the handler’s arm and buried itself in the vliegeng’s midsection.

“Shit! Another!”

Vera hurriedly loaded another bolt and charge, just in time for Lily to fire it at the handler merely five  _ evara _ away. This one couldn’t miss, taking the Copper clean through the throat.

“Pull up! You’ll hit the beast!” It was too late. She felt the hull jerk up. “Augh, watch it!”

She turned to see Lily raking the beast’s side with the Blackbird’s wing, tearing open a long and shallow gash. Blood seeped out of the wound.  _ Is that enough… _

“<Heed me Great Khert! Take the Temperature from the vliegeng blood four  _ evara _ from my hand…>” she cast, condensing the blood’s heat into a fireball. There wasn’t a lot of blood and the cold night air had leeched away heat as well, leaving the wright with a somewhat small ball of flame. Vera threw it anyway at the beast’s head, setting the long black hair on fire. The vliegeng roared out in pain and flew back toward its pack, leaving the aviatrixes alone for the moment.

The howling wind around the craft suddenly gave Vera a mad idea of her own.

“Lily, I need you to climb up as high as you can, and then make a 45 degree dive straight at the big white one. Keep us as straight as you can, and speed up as you get closer,” she ordered.

“What?”

“Just do it! You owe me that much, at least!”

“Fine! Load a Sleeper first, though.” Lily climbed high and burst through the clouds again. As they circled back toward the vliegeng, Vera mentally recited the spell she was about to cast.

It was ingenious, really. Anything moving through the air encounters resistance from that air. Usually it’s a negligible force, since the strength depended on speed. But the Blackbird (and to a certain extent the vliegeng) did move fast, and the air resistance was why the motor had to continuously apply Momentum to stay aloft.

On the other hand, that air resistance produced a massive amount of Pressure on the nose of the aircraft. Vera hadn’t packed a bottle of isolated Pressure in her belt, a prudent decision at the time given Lily’s penchant for acrobatics. So now she was left with only the option of condensing the Pressure of the air on the nose. It was a risky spell to cast, with the local agitation high from the spell barrages, but it would be immensely powerful and provide a ridiculous speed boost to the Blackbird. Both effects might be enough to shatter the vliegeng formation. Then Lily and Vera could lure the remaining beasts toward Slim’s constructs.  _ Assuming there are any left. _

The Blackbird tilted down rather lazily, compared to the gut-wrenching dives Lily pulled earlier. How a human being could keep doing that and not have their heart stop permanently was beyond Vera. She pushed that thought out of her head and concentrated on her spell.

“<Heed me Great Khert!>”

As the Blackbird fell through the clouds, the enemy came back into full view. Lily wasn’t quite sure what Vera was planning, but what kind of team would they be if they didn’t trust each other? The fragments of Old Tainish that reached her ears from the rear seat allayed any lingering doubt.  _ Drawing Pressure from...somewhere. The air? _

She pushed that thought out of her head, and focused on the approaching enemy. Her hopes of making another attack on the  _ Soud _ ’s blue beast were dashed when she saw that it and a bright gold-colored one had chased after the handler-less red vliegeng, trying to coax it back into formation. The upside to that, however, was that the white beast was now guarded by a single vliegeng, the olive green beast with a mere four riders plus the handler. The situation wouldn’t last, and Lily still had to contend with the gaggle of wrights bent on shooting her precious aircraft down. She vaguely felt that the Blackbird was gaining speed at an even higher rate, even with the motor throttled almost to the limit.

Noticing her shallow dive, the green vliegeng rose up to meet the Blackbird, its forearms already outstretched and ready to swipe away. Lily hardly had to think before pulling the trigger. The shot was dead-on, burying itself almost entirely in between the beast’s beady black eyes. Lily guessed that the bolt must have penetrated the skull, because the vliegeng dropped alarmingly fast, to the detriment of its passengers. The way to the white beast was wide open.

Which, unfortunately, aided the enemy wrights just as much as it aided the aviatrixes.  _ Bastards must have been waiting for a chance _ , Lily thought bitterly, as she listened to the hiss of spellfire. Vera’s spell was still going, and the Blackbird was going viciously fast now.  _ I haven’t even touched the throttle… _

The wall of fire appeared again, but it erupted several  _ evara _ behind the aircraft, leaving hardly anything but a sizzling noise in the air. Pressure Aspects exploded everywhere around them except the front: the wrights were overshooting badly again. Lily rolled the aircraft around but kept her course straight, narrowly avoiding what would have been a lethal bouquet of Edge vectors. A few chipped the hull and tail, but no serious damage.  _ Come on Vera, what are you waiting for? _

The white beast began to pull away from the diving Blackbird. Lily banked left as the vliegeng swerved right, and Lily could see the the bright spellfire in the wrights’ palm ports at this distance. She was even close enough to read the lips of the rapidly-chanting men, no doubt telling the khert to obliterate the pesky aircraft before them.

But before they could finish, Vera practically bellowed the end of her spell.

“<Now!>”

A hiss along the khert line, and the white beast’s midsection exploded with tremendous force. Almost all the wrights were caught in the blast radius, and Lily could see dismembered hands flicker and fade as the khert reclaimed the Aspects in them. She didn’t have time to appreciate the horrific beauty, as the blast radius quickly caught up to the Blackbird, throwing it wildly out of control.

“Damn it, Vera!” Lily cursed as she struggled with the stick and pedals to steady the aircraft. The blast had sent them into a chaotic spin, spiralling toward the ground amidst chunks of the white vliegeng.

With white knuckles and intense effort, Lily managed to aim the nose upward again. The motor, still set at a very high acceleration, kicked in more Momentum and sent the aircraft up. Gravity slowed the spin, and Lily managed to level out the aircraft. She breathed a sigh of relief and drew back the throttle. As she turned back to check on Vera, her eye caught the head and shoulders of the white vliegeng, blown off the rest of its slithering body and falling to earth. The handler was still gripping the reins, at least, the upper half of him was. Lily couldn’t spot the lower half.  _ Til the very end, how touching. For an Ald. _

Vera looked...bad. A few bloody tears were leaking out of her eyes, and her nose was gushing red, though the wright was trying to hold it in with her white cloak. Her fingers were still smoldering, but she managed to give a weak thumbs up.

“So,” she blurted out, shifting her blood-soaked cloak from her face. “How was  _ my _ crazy move? Did I make you shit bricks at least?”

“Mmmm, yes but only because of that spin,” Lily replied. “If we were clear of the blast, I would have been ecstatic.” She glanced up. “Hey, where’s Blondie?”

Vera looked around, then pointed back north.

“Looks like he got tired of playing around,” she noted. Indeed, the three remaining vliegeng had turned around, likely to fly back to their base camp. The riders on the blue beast had long coils of rope in their hands, leading the riderless red vliegeng to their right.

“Oh no you don’t!” Lily circled back toward the retreating vliegeng, the motor pushed nearly to the limit again. The Blackbird steadily closed the gap between it and the flying beasts.

“Hey captain!” Vera asked haughtily. “What bolt and charge?”

_ Heh, almost forgot about that. _

“Regular to both!” Lily replied. She began to climb again. Without wrights, the Alds were vulnerable to long-range attacks.  _ Likely why that  _ Soud _ is running like a little bitch. _

As Lily gained height above her prey, the gold vliegeng shifted position back and up, covering the blue vliegeng from the Blackbird’s well-proven weaponry. A few men on its rather hefty backside shot crossbows of their own at the craft. One quarrel bounced right off the hull, doing little more than scuffing the paint.

“Ha! Limper than a dead fish now, those pricks!” Lily teased. She took aim at the gold beast’s handler.  _ I’m feeling a little merciful tonight. Just a little. _ She pulled the trigger.

The bolt pierced the handler’s shoulder, a painful wound certainly, but by no means fatal. One of his comrades went to try to pull it out, despite the head completely sticking out of the exit wound. The rest tried to shield him from further attack.

“Keep the bolts coming, dear!” Lily ordered. She cut back the motor just a bit, keeping the distance between her and the gold beast roughly constant. Then she just kept firing the cannon, pulling the trigger whenever the ‘ready’ light blinked on. Seven bolts peppered the air before every rider on the gold vliegeng was dead or badly wounded. Just for insult, Lily sent an eighth bolt into the handler’s skull, even though he was already dead from two bolts in the chest.

The gold beast seemed to sense its handler’s demise and roared a mournful cry before dropping back. Nothing stood between the Blackbird and the blue vliegeng now. 

“Alright Blondie, it’s just you and me now!” Lily bellowed. “Let’s finish this! Vera, Sleeper!”

“We’ve got two left!”

“And just one more target! Load it, I say!”

“Done!” Vera replied. “And Slim’s chiro-ed back. Says he’s crossed the Jarla, moving north as fast as he can. Constructs cloaked and ready. Wants to know where we are.”

Lily looked to her rear, trying to spy the Jarla. The river was a thin blue line in the distance.  _ Fuckin’ Tirna, this pissmop might just get away. Well, the night’s young enough for one more mad maneuver. _

“Tell him we’re keeping his ale cold and his vliegeng steak dinner hot!” Lily replied. “Vera, we need to herd these boys south! If I can’t kill the fuckin’  _ Soud _ , I’ll line his ass up for Gert’s ‘loper!”

She heard Vera sigh.  _ Well, at least we’re not in so much danger that we can’t be exasperated with each other. _

Lily assessed the situation. The red vliegeng was still tied to the blue one, though riders on the latter had broken off that task. They had instead turned toward the Blackbird, brandishing their pitiful melee weapons and hurling insults laden more with rage of loss than confidence of victory. She had a Sleeper chambered, otherwise she would have answered them with swift sharp steel.  _ That bolt has only two targets worthwhile, the beast and its master. I’d have a better shot from the front, but this damned goat-snake is too quick. Can’t try the belly either. _

She banked the aircraft into a wide left turn, putting a bit of distance between her and the still-fleeing blue vliegeng. Then she jerked back right and fired the bolt at the side of the beast’s head.

One of the riders, the young olive-skinned lad she saw what seemed like an eternity ago, spotted her maneuver, and ran down the beast’s forearm. He leapt off the hand into the bolt’s path, catching it in his left arm.  _ Fuck! _ The vliegeng slowed and dropped altitude to catch the brave but likely doomed lad.

“Load regular, keep ‘em coming!” Lily barked, as she sped up the Blackbird. Though her Sleeper had been wasted, the beast yielded its own speed and height to save its savior, and Lily pulled ahead.

“If you’ve got any Aspects left, dear, now’s the time!”

The wright evidently had Light and a small amount of Edge. Vera threw the first to blind their foes, before sending the Edges right on that spell’s heels. The vectors scored the beast’s back and cut down two Aldishmen. They also sliced the ropes leading the red vliegeng, and the riderless beast was free to fly rampant every which way but north, dragging away one poor Ald by a particularly thick rope. A quick glance back revealed that the gold beast was in a similar state, wandering low over the countryside looking for food. It was just the Blackbird and the blue vliegeng, one on one, construct against beast, machine versus nature.

_ Ha! We’ve got a wright, and you’ve got, what, a dying boy and three sword fools. Yeah, I see you Blondie with two swords. What are you gonna do with them...wait _ , Lily halted her mental trash talk and watched the young lad rip the bolt out of his arm. It was hard to tell from this distance, but Lily quickly realized the arm was a prosthetic. It was useless now, but the lad wouldn’t be bleeding out or suffering from Sleepleaf poisoning.

The  _ Soud _ had one of his swords drawn in his left hand, and had the right behind his back. The young lad behind him had gotten his footing and his spear back. Behind him was a stout ginger-haired Aldishman, armed with a poleaxe and clad in a breastplate. Bringing up the rear of the beast was what appeared to be an animal medic, who was trying to bind up the cuts dealt earlier.  _ Or he’s just a desperate regular medic. _

“Alright, try this!” she challenged. Lily throttled the motor once more and pulled far ahead of the blue vliegeng. Then she made a tight 180 degree turn to face the beast, unleashing a furious salvo of bolts as she charged head-on.

The  _ Soud _ evidently knew his way around a sword, swatting aside a bolt. The ginger Ald’s breastplate proved useless when a bolt took out his right eye. The medic was struck through the left leg, causing him to slip on the vliegeng blood seeping out of a cut. He fell off the beast, struggling to pull out the bolt as he went down.

The Blackbird and the vliegeng seemed destined to collide in a mutually suicidal impact. Lily didn’t care.  _ I can still pull up. _

She didn’t need to, because when the two aerial combatants were less than five  _ evara _ apart, the  _ Soud  _ leapt up and his beast dropped below. His left hand flashed, and suddenly a sword crashed through Lily’s windshield, missing her head by mere inches. She saw him fling something from his right hand as well, just as the Blackbird passed between beast and handler.

Then the vliegeng and the aircraft were hurtling away from each other, the former flying north and the latter southbound.

“Sonuva...Well, Blondie, I’ll admit, you do know how to show a gal a good time,” Lily seethed. “Vera! Load the last Sleeper!” She heard no reply. “Vera?” She glanced back.

The wright had a long cut across her face, from the bridge of her nose down to the side of her right cheek. There was an tinge of bright green in the wound. It didn’t seem to be wide though, but Vera was starting to slump, her eyes fluttering.

“...Fucker...threw...Sleeper…” she managed to slur, before losing consciousness.

The events from seconds ago replayed in Lily’s mind as she put the pieces together.  _ The  _ Soud _ must have taken the bolt from the lad with the broken arm. Waited for his opportunity, then made his move. _

“Fuck!” the pilot swore, slamming her fist on the hull. Tears were welling in her eyes.  _ Vera… _

A red light on the tank gauge caught her attention.

“Shit shit shit shit.”  _ Not enough Momentum to get back to the landing strip. I’ve got five, maybe ten minutes if I go at the minimum speed. _ The river Jarla grew larger in her view, albeit distorted through the cracked windshield.

Lily considered bailing out of the aircraft, redirecting her Momentum to land in the river. She could break open the glass windshield by brute force, and take her chances in the open sky.  _ No, I can’t leave Vera to die. I can’t let our baby go down without a fight. Well, fight against gravity. _ She drew her hand back from the harness latch and gripped the controls again.  _ Easy does it _ , she thought as she drew down the motor as far as she could and still stay aloft. She steered the Blackbird toward a wide section of the river, where a forest hugged the Jarla’s north bank.

A nearby popping noise drew her gaze aside. The red vliegeng was engulfed in one, then two blasts, balls of red and orange ripping through its flesh.  _ Must be Slim’s Rockwalks! _

An anguished roar came from another direction. Lily turned to see the gold vliegeng carved from head to tail by an unseen blade, its blood and entrails spraying out over the countryside.  _ Fireloper. Am I glad to see you...sort of.  _ She saw some blood splatter over the invisible construct, making it faintly visible again.

She barely had time to rejoice, knowing her countrymen were here, when the pymaric motor hissed and died away, the Bronze tanks devoid of vital isolated Momentum. Then all of her focus was fixed on the controls and the view in the windshield. The altitude meter was decreasing steadily, and the nose began to dip toward the earth. Lily pulled back the stick, trying to level out the Blackbird. The aircraft was no longer powered, and became simply a glider with far too much weight to stay aloft for long. Lily prayed to every Twin that it would glide for long enough.

The Jarla grew larger in Lily’s vision, and for a moment she felt a glimmer of hope.  _ I can make it! Save the Blackbird, save Vera, go home a hero for killing six vliegeng in a night… _ Then the river vanished from the front view, and the forest canopy came flooding up, a sea of dark green filling the cracked windshield. The still-lodged sword rattled loudly next to Lily’s ear. She pulled back on the stick, but it would go no farther.

The Blackbird crashed into the forest, impact after impact jolting the craft. Lily struggled to stay focused through the incessant jarring. The left wing slammed into a thick trunk and bent back almost to the hull. The air fin on the right wing was sheared off by another tree, followed a second later by the outer half of the wing. A crash made Lily flinch and press on the rudder pedal, sending the tail into yet another tree. The ground came up faster and faster, until finally the aircraft burst into a large clearing and struck the forest floor, the nose slamming into a boulder and bringing the craft to an abrupt halt.

Lily was thrown forward hard by the final crash, and her head smacked into the front of the cockpit. As her vision went dark, she could hear running water in the distance, and a faint bark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, my greatest thanks. Just a little more...
> 
> (Scene best read with Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone in the background)


	8. Epilogue

 

Lily Orel woke up on a cot in a bright white tent. Her left arm was in a sling, and there were bandages wrapped around her forehead and various spots on her body. She tried to sit up, and was stopped by a burst of pain from her stomach and ribs.

“Ooh, I would not do that, Captain Orel,” a voice admonished. Lily turned her head toward it, though that action too brought forth pain.

“Wuh…” As the haze in her vision cleared, she could see an army medic.

“Broke quite a few bones,” the medic answered. “Lacerations all over, a nasty concussion, but you’ll recover.”

Lily took a moment to gather herself.

“V...Vera...Captain Elik?” she finally asked. The medic pointed over.

“No, don’t strain your neck,” she said, stopping Lily from looking over. “She’s still out cold. I’m not sure what happened to her, because aside from the cut on her face I can’t find any other injuries.”

“Sleep...Sleepleaf...in the cut,” Lily mumbled, feeling incredibly relieved deep down that her partner was alive. The medic’s face brightened, then darkened.

“Thought I smelled something when I was stitching her up. I can try leeching it out now, but that would just wake her up a little earlier.” The medic walked over and out of Lily’s sight, already softly chanting the Old Tainish.

Lily doubled over to cough, and that brought a fresh wave of hurt from her injuries.

“Ha, so Cresce will have a hero instead of a martyr,” a familiar voice bellowed from outside. Lieutenant General Slim ambled in and over to Lily’s bedside. “Damned fine flying, Captain, though our pickets only caught your little tussle with the blue beastie.”

“What happened?” Lily asked, her head fairly clear now. Slim pulled up a chair and plopped his considerable bulk into it.

“Hmph, well, we saw your construct go down into the forest well enough. Lucky for you, Lieutenant Zara was on patrol in those woods, and found you pretty quick. Took her a bit to pull both of you out of that wreck though.”

Lily winced at that last remark.  _ The Blackbird… _

“Relax, relax, captain,” Slim reassured, noticing the look on her face. “We’re salvaging what we can find. The construct is top secret Crescian technology, and we can’t have it falling into the wrong hands now can we?”

_ Ah, wrong hands. Aldish hands… _

“The... blue vliegeng. Handler had blonde locks, must have been a  _ Soud _ ,” Lily said. “Did you get him?”

Slim shook his head.

“While our constructs were dealing with the gold and red beasts, the blue goat-snake made its getaway,” he answered. “Was skating fast and straight, so likely his handler was still at the reins.”

“Damn it!” Lily slammed her fist on the bed, forgetting about the cuts. “Ow ow ow.”

“Woah, take it easy captain. You’ve done more than enough for Cresce.”

“Hmph, I’m not happy knowing he can still run back to his little camp in the hills.”

“Ha, well, I did get your first report. Our hounds are racing there now, and Gert said he spotted some skirmishing in the north. No further sign of the blue beast though.” Slim rose to leave. “But you can rest your mind. We’ll find that camp and burn it out, and the  _ Soud _ heretic too if he’s still there.”

Lily stared at his receding backside for a bit, before turning (with a monumental effort and dirty looks from the medic) toward Vera’s cot.

The wright was indeed out cold. If not for the stitches on her cheek, she would have looked like she had dozed off in the middle of a book.

Lily stretched out her right arm and grasped Vera’s hand.  _ Isn’t cold at least, a good sign. _

“Glad you’re in one piece,” she whispered. “Even if our baby isn’t. Sorry for being reckless, I should have kept a close eye on the tank.” A single tear rolled out of her eye.

The image of the  _ Soud _ entered her thoughts, the enraged face under those blonde locks as the fiend leapt up and struck not one but two blows against Lily and Vera.

“One day, Blondie,” Lily swore a little oath.  _ For Vera. _ “One day.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap. For now.


End file.
